2025 Nobel Peace Prize Winner and History

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I love Friday for a lot of different reasons. It's
always a lot of fun when there's not crazy, hardbreaking news.
You know, we got good news in the Middle East.
You know, first phase is in process. There's an agreement
between Israel and Hamas. There's a deadline against seventy two
hours essentially for the hostages to officially be released. Donald
Trump is planning on going this weekend to the region

(00:20):
in Egypt, which is nearby, it's bordering Israel to the south,
and have a chance to, you know, maybe be a
part of this. Donald Trump really wants to be a
part of this peace agreement, and he wants to be
known as the anti war president. The peace president makes sense,
and it's not a secret he really I think once

(00:42):
the Nobel Peace Prize he kind of already Karena said,
I don't think I'm going to win it this year,
and it's probably because they award this thing out and
a lot of it goes back to the previous year.
If Donald Trump can get this conflict to an end,
which there's no guarantee that we're already there yet, right like,
if there's a finish line and this is like a

(01:02):
one hundred meter dash this peace agreement. We're really just
getting out of the blocks, like we've got a ways
to go to make sure that we get to the
everlasting piece, the comprehensive peace and the rehabilitation of Gaza
for us to really feel like, okay, it's officially over
now this war at least. And then of course that
Ukraine Russia thing is looming, and if he's able to

(01:24):
finish that off, Donald Trump's going to definitely for his
efforts to end world conflicts, even though he has helped
prevent world conflicts like India and Pakistan for instance. I'm
telling you he's gonna have a great chance. He didn't
win this year, though, because today they announced that Maria
Karna Machado is the winner. The fifty eight year old

(01:47):
from Venezuela is the leader of the Democratic Party essentially,
and by democratic it's not like liberals and progressives here,
it's literally like she is attempting to overthrow the government.
She's trying to lead the opposition party to get a
more democratic system in place in a very corrupt government

(02:07):
in Venezuela. And she's basically in hiding right now. I
mean like she is trying to be oppressed by the government,
a very corrupt government, as I mentioned in Venezuela. So
I don't know enough about her. I don't know enough
about how hard she's worked for that, But I don't
give out this award. You might be thinking to yourself, okay,

(02:28):
so who does well? I have the answer for you.
The Norwegian Parliament appoints the Norwegian Nobel Committee. They select
the laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize, and that's what
they call the winner, by the way, the Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate. Now, of course this is named after Alfred Nobel,

(02:51):
who is a Swedish industrialist, inventor and armaments manufacturer. And
they've been giving out the Nobel Peace Prize in Nobel
Prizes in chemistry, physics, physiology, physiology or medicine, and literature.
The Nobel Peace Prize probably the most famous of them,
you know, like the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry,

(03:13):
like some famous scientists like the Einstein's of the world
have gotten that. But and this is not a this
is not like so old. It's been going on for centuries,
but it is pretty old. The first award was given
out December tenth of nineteen oh one, the Nobel Peace Prize,
so one hundred and twenty three years ago. Now there's

(03:33):
a lot of controversial factors to this. How political do
they get? What do they say about these people who
are the you know who's been actually nominated. That's a
completely different, you know, conversation list. But I do, for
whatever it's worth, have the Laureate list in front of me.
The first ever winner. Can you can you guess? And

(03:54):
they give you a reason the rationale. It's a one
sentence rationale nineteen oh one. Yep, ah, no no idea, Yeah, okay.
Henry Dunnett, the nant from Switzerland, was awarded it for
his humanitarian efforts to help wounded soldiers and to create
international understanding, and he shared it with French guy Friedrich

(04:18):
Pass for his lifelong work for international peace conferences, diplomacy
and arbitration. Both of these guys were in their seventies
when they were awarded this in nineteen oh one, so
it was kind of like almost a lifetime achievement award
for both of these guys. Anyway, you might be thinking, okay,
so how many important people have actually won this that

(04:38):
I would know of? Because Donald Trump really wants to
win this and he will deserve it. If he can
end the war in Gaza here and he certainly is
going to get a lot of credit for that, And
if he can help get Ukraine in Russia, which is
much further apart than I think he ever thought they were,
but if he could find a way to, you know,
bring them together, He's going to be the favorite and

(04:59):
the leader in the clubhouse until next October when they
announced the twenty twenty six winner. The United States, for
whatever it's worth, leads the way twenty three Nobel Peace
Prize laureates second place on the list the United Kingdom
with twelve, So they almost have doubled up every other
nation or every other entity that has had a winner.
I say entity, because the United Nations slash League of

(05:20):
Nations have ten winners of the people who have been
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. All right, so you know
who won last year? Pop quiz who won last year? Yeah?
I no no idea I should know this way. It's
a company called Nihon Hidonkyo. Yeah. Okay, So there's going
to be a theme here of you not knowing what

(05:42):
I'm about to say. I know the way Nihon Hidankyo
for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear
weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons
must never be used again.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
I would say that's a fairly peaceful project, to say
the least, unless you're firing a nuclear miss at an asteroid,
which I'm going to get to a little bit later
on in the show. There's only one person that I
think I confidently know won it, and I don't want
to Who's it. Barack Obama.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
He did win it in two thousand and nine. He's
the last president to win it. Not many presidents have
won it, but presidents have won it before. Barack Obama
won it in two thousand and nine for his extraordinary
efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. Keep
in mind this would have been in the middle of
his first year as president of the United States, So
I think just the hype of having him as the president,

(06:31):
his efforts in his campaign maybe to bring people together,
and then what he did early in his presidency I
suppose really impressed the people who and he was one
of the controversial ones, I'm sure, because like, oh, did
a great one well, you're not going to like the
fact that a couple of years earlier, Al Gore and
the inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change one in two

(06:52):
thousand and seven. There's another very political determination. They won
for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge
about man made climate change and to lay the foundations
for the measures that are needed to counteract such change. Yeah,
there you go, I keep scrolling. I mean names like
Mohammad Yunis from Bangladesh, Wangari Muta Matai from Kenya. Ninety

(07:18):
plus percent of these people, the average person has no
idea who they are. Jimmy Carter one in two thousand
and two, for his decades of untiring efforts to find
peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights,
and to remote economic and social development. Very nice guy.
Jimmy Carter. Not a great president, but he certainly was

(07:38):
known for his ability to be a peaceful individual. Let's
see here, scrolling, scrolling, still scrolling. Oh, nineteen ninety four
was a big deal. Jitsak Rabin from Israel, Shimon Perez
also in Israeli leadership, and then the Palestine president, the
first ever Palestinian president, Yasir Arafat back in nineteen nine,

(08:00):
for they all three shared the Nobel Peace Prize for
their efforts to create peace in the Middle East right
now didn't last very long, but for their efforts at
the time, at least they were given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Across the lot of them, I will tell you the
other more notable people that we would have heard of

(08:21):
that have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and I'll tell
you exactly why. Maria Coriina Machado won from Venezuela this year.
She is a person who has been trying to be
the opponent to the government of Hugo Chavez and now
Nicholas Maduro, who are the corrupt national or the corrupt

(08:43):
leaders of Venezuela, which we know to be just kind
of a mess governmentally. And she's been awarded several different
things over the last few years, but today officially awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts. She's fifty eight
years old, she's been doing this for a long time.
She's been in venezuel government. She's trying to make a better,
more democratic, just better for the Venezuelan people. And she's

(09:08):
being not like acknowledged for that. They gave her the
award today, saying for her tireless work promoting democratic rights
for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to
achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.
I don't know if she's going to achieve what she
wants to achieve. She is in hiding, basically trying to
avoid being a target from the Maduro regime which is

(09:31):
currently in charge. I looked up what like her political
ideology was, just to try to understand how you just
describe her political beliefs, because we don't really have that
problem here, right, We don't have a dictatorship that is
trying to be overthrown to have a democracy or a republic.
We already have one of those. She's being described as
a liberal conservative, which to us is an oxymoron and

(09:54):
something that can't actually be a true statement. But if
you read the definition of what liberal conservatism is, it
reads it's a political ideology combining conservative policies with some
liberal stances, especially on economic issues, but also on social
and ethical matters, representing a brand of political conservatism strongly
influenced by liberalism. So probably more we would consider somebody

(10:18):
like this like a moderate, and it would just depend
on how you would talk to her of what she
believed in certain things. But you got to keep in
mind we're kind of conditioned in the United States that
if you're a conservative, well, you like the Second Amendment,
you want gun rights, you are anti abortion, you're very
pro life, you are very anti taxes. Hey give me
my own money, government, stay out of my business. Get

(10:40):
the federal government out of my way. If you're a liberal,
you are very pro diversity, you are very pro I
don't want to say socialism, but you are interested in
kind of wealth sharing of some kind. You are against guns,
you are pro choice for women, all of that stuff. Right,

(11:00):
You kind of already conditioned. If you pick one side
or the other, you just fall into all of these things.
In other countries, when they have different debates about different things,
they have completely different kind of spectrums. So a person
could identify as a liberal conservative, But in the terminology
that we know, that makes no sense, and there really

(11:22):
is it, Like we would have to ask her because
there's no obvious answers. If you ask her about gun rights,
if you asked her about taxes, if you asked her
about economies and how an economy should operate, or what
pro life, pro abortion, whatever the stance would be on that.
It's hard to know. She would just kind of have
an open mind on all that you'd have to ask.

(11:44):
So pretty Interestingty, pretty interesting. I have more people who
have won the Nobel Peace Prize that we would actually
maybe hear of. Nelson Mandela from South Africa, wanted alongside
Frederick William de Clerk in South Africa in nineteen ninety
three for their work for the peaceful termination of the
apartheid regime and for laying the foundations for a new

(12:05):
democratic South Africa. That makes sense. Mikhail Gorbachev, Sylviet Union
in nineteen ninety for the leading role he played in
the radical changes in East Wester relangess relations. Missa Gorbashov
teardown this wall. Yeah, there you go, Soviet Union. Who knew.

(12:25):
Let's see here, there's some there's some United Nations stuff
and people. I'm not going to read those. Mother Teresa
nineteen seventy nine from India for her work for bringing
help to suffering humanity. She was very well thought of.
You could read a lot of books about Mother Teresa

(12:46):
and the stuff that she was up to. Let's see,
still scrawling, still scrolling. What's another name, Oh, Henry Kissinger
along with Lee Duke Dahl in nineteen seventy three for
jointly having negotiated to ceasefire and vs. Vietnam in nineteen
seventy three, so essentially getting us to the end of
the ever present Vietnam War, which, by the way, we

(13:07):
don't talk about enough, was really an offshoot of what
was occurring in the Cold War with communism and the
growth of communism. That was one of many things that
occurred because we were in a Cold War. Yeah, we
never went to war directly with Russia theoretically or the
Soviet Union, but it was their attempt to spread communism
around the world and our apparent responsibility to try to

(13:30):
prevent that from taking place that got us involved in
several different conflicts in some sweaty thoughts, especially like Cuban
Missile crisis. To read about some of that crazy stuff.
In the sixties, the world was a much scarier place
than even than it is now. In nineteen sixty four,
Martin Luther King Junior won for his nonviolent struggle for
civil rights for the Afro American population. That's notable. Let's

(13:55):
see here who else won this thing? George Catlett Marshall Junior,
nineteen fifty three, United States General George Marshall for proposing
and supervising the plan for the economic Recovery of Europe,
which again you have the coming out of World War Two,
Europe was a mess, a big, big mess. Still scrolling,

(14:19):
still scoring. In nineteen forty eight, they did not award
the Nobel Peace Prize because there was no suitable living candidate,
which is very odd. They did give a tribute, however,
to the recently assassinated Mohandas Gandhi in India. So he

(14:39):
died and they gave him a tribute, but they didn't
award him the prize because he was not living in
nineteen forty eight, still scrolling. This is telling you how
few people realistically, we wouldn't have his notable people to
win the Nobel Peace Prize. How important is this. It's
a great prize for one person to say, for their
legacy or for what they have tried to achieve. It

(15:01):
is a goal that people have and you can tell
Donald Trump would like that. But for people who all
of a sudden care about Donald Trump should have won
it this year and all this stuff. It's like, yeah,
take it easy. There's a lot going on in the world,
and he will certainly be the leader in the favorite
to win it in twenty twenty six after an hopeful
resolution to this Israel war and then if he can

(15:23):
help be a catalyst in ending the Russia and Ukraine War.
Jane Adams from the United States, along with Nicholas Murray
Butler the United States back in nineteen ninety or sorry,
nineteen thirty one, for their assiduous effort to revive the
ideal of peace and to rekindle the spirit of peace
and their own nation and the whole of mankind. Wow,

(15:44):
and read some of their writings. Still scrolling, Still scrolling.
What drow Wilson. There you go, a guy that many
Republicans in modern modern conservatives think one of the true
worst presidents of all time. He's not the worst. He's

(16:04):
not among the top five worst, at least to me
based on the bottom three have to be the three
guys between Zachary Taylor and the Civil War, and that's
Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. Those guys basically
just kicked the can hard enough that we got into
a civil war for four full years. Thanks guys, appreciate

(16:25):
the efforts of trying to help our country. You have
to put William Henry Harrison in there, because he died
thirty days in office, and he died like right away.
And there are plenty of other bad guys like you
can go to John Tyler, who did nothing after taking
over for William Henry Harrison. He wasn't actually elected, so
that was a weird situation. Andrew Johnson was an absolute abomination,

(16:48):
but it was kind of not his fault too, because
Abraham Lincoln wanted to unite the two parties, so he
brought a Tennessee Democrat who had absolutely no values the
same except he just didn't really want to have a
civil war. He was okay with like the slaves being free.
That was a bit of a weird thing for a
Democrat from the South. But after Lincoln was assassinated, nobody

(17:10):
could work with Andrew Johnson. He did not. He really
stunted the recovery efforts. So he's got to be up there.
Woodrow Wilson in no way, no matter how you feel
about him as a guy, there's no way you can
put him above those guys. Anyway. He won for his
role as the founder of the League of Nations. It
was his idea. The League of Nations didn't go super
duper well and eventually was replaced by the United Nations,

(17:32):
but the idea was this is a great way for
people around the world to consistently be communicating with each other.
That makes sense. Let's see here another president, Theodore Roosevelt
Teddy Roosevelt nineteen oh sixty one, for his role in
bringing to an end the bloody war recently waged by
two of the world's great powers, Japan and Russia. One
hundred and twenty years ago, Theodore Roosevelt winning the Nobel

(17:54):
Peace Prize for ending a war involving Russia. Could you
imagine if twenty twenty six, one twenty years later, another
sitting president, Donald Trump, can get credit for doing pretty
much the same thing'd be pretty awesome. That's pretty much
the list, ladies and gentlemen, of the notable or obviously
notable people that I can pull out of this list

(18:17):
to have won the Nobel Peace Prize. And we'll see
a year from now if Donald Trump can't add his
name to that list the winner, which, by the way,
her name is Maria Karna Machado. Maria Karna Machado for
those who are interested, and I did have a person
email me in try to explain what a liberal conservative

(18:40):
would be, which is what they say her political ideology is.
It's hard to know exactly what that means if you're
just looking through politics and an American lens, because a
liberal conservative sounds very contradictory, right, Like a liberal and
a conservative are two different people, almost like going back

(19:00):
in time a couple hundred years and trying to figure
out who the Democratic Republicans are, which was kind of
the forerunner to the Democratic Party. Well, Charles sent me
an email and said, liberal in this sense means someone
who's pro free market and individual rights. That's classical liberalism,
and it doesn't really fit into contemporary American politics unless
you're more of a true libertarian what we would call libertarian.

(19:23):
So that's good context here. It's also interesting how she
received that she was She told the secretary of the
group that awards this thing out, which you know is
in Norway, you know, they're Norwegian group of people. But

(19:45):
she said, oh my gee, she i have no words.
I thank you so much, but I hope you understand
this is a movement, this is an achievement of a
whole society. I am just one person. I certainly do
not deserve it. That's a good answer if you win
something well. In English, she made a post on X

(20:06):
and I didn't read this earlier. Should have. I just
now found it. I dedicate the prize to the suffering
people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive
support for our cause. She thanks Donald Trump. She thanked
Donald Trump. Now I don't know what that means, but

(20:27):
it's interesting. A lot of people in the Conservative movement
and MAGA people, they know Donald Trump is trying to
get the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn't get it, and
they're upset that he got snubbed. I'm telling you, ladies
and gentlemen, if he's gonna win it, it's gonna be
next year. When he is, You're going to be able
to see the completion of the end of the war
in Gaza, the completion hopefully of the end of the

(20:48):
war in Russia and Ukraine with both of those parties.
Hopefully we don't sit here for another twelve months and
that's still raging. But who's to say with how that's
going on When you have people like the current now
laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize saying thank you to
Donald Trump for his decisive support of our cause. That's awakening. Right.

(21:10):
This is a person trying to fight back against the
corrupt government in Venezuela, and she's just been awarded one
of the most prestigious civilian prizes in awards that one
can receive in the world, even if we don't know
ninety percent of the people who've actually won this thing before.

(21:33):
But she goes on social media and her first thought
is to thank Donald Trump. What does that tell you?
That tells you that Donald J. Trump holds a lot
more power and is swinging a much bigger stick than
anybody on the political left thinks he is. And what
are you going to say? Right, We've talked about Barack
Obama and Nelson Mandela and al Gore and climate changers

(21:56):
and people who are you know, maybe some controversy picks
over the years as to who wins the Nobel Peace
Prize or is the laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Will you want to know something I think I think
this is about as powerful of a statement about him,

(22:17):
Donald Trump as a leader than him even winning the award.
Is when somebody most of us have never even heard of,
in no disrespect to Maria Cortina Machado, who you know,
obviously has done some notable work in the country of Venezuela,
but we've never even heard of her. But she wins

(22:39):
the Nobel Peace Prize and her first thought is to say,
Donald Trump, thank you so much for supporting our cause.
That's crazy, man. So instead of saying like, oh, well,
look how corrupt the you know, the political lefty liberals
are gonna be like, oh, the Nobel Peace Prize, the
Nobel Prize committee, they're just the Norwegian Nobel Committee has

(23:02):
no idea what they're doing. They're just thanking Donald Trump.
How much would he pay to get that award? No,
they award it to somebody who's winning other humanitarianism awards.
Somebody in Venezuela who has to go into hiding because
she's being oppressed and her voice is being impressed by
a corrupt government. And she goes on social media and
the first thing that she says is thank you to

(23:22):
President Trump for his decisive support for our cause. That's
so crazy. We'll see, though, We'll see if there's there's
anything else that could potentially take place here. As it

(23:43):
relates to the Nobel Peace Prize without Trump winning it,
this is a pretty important situation, and I think going
in next year, certainly Donald Trump's gonna have a great
chance to win the Nobel Peace President. I know he
wants it, but man, that is a it's a fascinating situation.
Fascinating to say the least.