How October 7 changed Canada
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Summary
Dahlia Kurtz joins me on the phone to talk about the events of October 7th and the impact it has had on her life and the way she is using her voice in the current political climate. She talks about how she has been able to use her voice to speak out against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Canada.
Transcript
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My friend Dahlia Kurtz, I actually met in Israel for the first time in person.
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She and I were colleagues for the same radio company some years ago,
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and we had the chance to go and travel Israel as part of a delegation of Canadian journalists
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Dahlia was working on a book about something that had nothing to do with politics,
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nothing to do with Israel, but was pushed off of that project onto another one in the wake of October 7th.
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That book is called Dear Zionist, You Are Not Alone, just came out in the last few days,
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Dahlia, wonderful to talk to you again. Thank you so much for coming today.
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They redirected it in the inappropriate way they were supposed to use those lasers to send them...
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Let's start on that comment by Chrystia Freeland,
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And even just now, we're talking about a serious topic,
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but you've always been just this ray of sunshine in Canadian media.
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I know you always used to highlight good news stories and positive things.
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I've seen from you a lot more of an edge since October 7th,
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but I was wondering if you could speak about how what's happened
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has really pushed the way that you are using your voice.
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Well, one, when you're an independent, things change.
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People don't have to tell you to not be as Jewish.
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But the other part of it is October 7th, I just put everything aside.
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I'm going to be that person that I always thought I would be
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And let me tell you, anybody who is a child of the Holocaust,
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It's going to be in the back of your brain forever.
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To hear Chrystia Friedland speak the way that she does,
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I mean, the entire thing was absolutely laughable.
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So all I can do is, I wrote an entire joke about it online,
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She could have asked any one of the hundred plus people in that room,
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like you said, to just play a little clip of the audio there.
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Let me just say, Islamophobia is on the rise in Canada,
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which she forgot to mention in that whole little spiel
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he is one of the Nazi newspapers that recruits,
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hmm, who did we end up seeing in our parliament?
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So, you know, it's not her action that I'm looking at.
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It was an attempted break in entry in Winnipeg a couple of weeks back.
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You could see like this lock was sort of broken.
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Nobody should be scared of a place they worship in.
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What about the hundred churches that have gone up in place?
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What about the Jews who 400,000 of us with numbers dwindling as we're moving away,
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And it's come to a point where the way I feel about it is everybody keeps saying, lead, lead.
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And I mean, just yesterday I shared some investigative journalism that I've done
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where I looked at the person who had been campaigning for the mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow.
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And this person, Mozambique Patel, I have a video in this tweet where you can see him asking,
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demanding that we kill Israel, the very person who has been campaigning with Olivia Chow.
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I think it is absolutely ridiculous that we even ask the leaders to do better.
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There's nothing to do better because one, they're leaders with air quotes.
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So we see what they're capable of and we see what they're not capable of.
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It's up to anybody who will speak up and not be afraid.
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Andrew, it boggles my mind that people call me outspoken.
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You said something a few moments ago I wanted to revisit because you said it, I think, almost
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But you had said the type of person, you wanted to be the type of person you thought you'd
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And I found that word again quite jarring because you and I know that terrorism in Israel is not
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I mean, when you and I were there in 2015, there had been a spate of knife stabbings on the street.
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And Israelis have a much higher than normal tolerance level for these sorts of things
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It takes a lot for something to rise to front page news in Israel that elsewhere in the
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But when you say never again, you're putting October 7th, as I understand it, in the same
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And that's not even coming from my mouth directly.
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That's coming from every hostage who's been released.
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And so I'm going to take from the people who are there, I'm going to take from the feeling
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I was looking at Columbia University and all of the students there who are blocking the
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And I juxtaposed that against a picture I saw from 1938 in Vienna, where the students were
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And I thought, I'm going to find, obviously, the similarities in this.
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But what really struck me were not the similarities.
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It was the fact that now, in 2024, where it looked worse because you saw more students,
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The worst part about it is that these students who are now joining in this Kristallnacht, as
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it was described by the Jewish students at Columbia, they've had the opportunity to see history.
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They've had the opportunity to learn from history.
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And they have chosen the side of be less than human from history.
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So that choice unto itself makes this much worse than what we experienced before.
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And to see the way that Canada has reacted, to see what's happening in the U.S., to see
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I can completely understand how you create bonds and you create bonds with people.
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It's the entire bond of, you know, it's the bond of being one, because you know that not
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But at the same time, there are a bunch of people who are suffering and not everybody has
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And since October 7th, I've been receiving messages because I've been very bold and I have
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been blacklisted up the wazoo, Andrew, death threats, blacklisted, my entire mission has
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just gone to, okay, fine, I'm just going to pour myself into this.
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You can't pay rent with pouring yourself into something.
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And if people are sending me messages from around the world saying that I'm doing something
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that's helping them, well, that's absolutely fantastic.
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So I decided to write this book, Dear Zionist, You Are Not Alone, 18 Letters of Hope and Light.
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And the whole idea of it, first of all, is that this is not about Jews.
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The quickest Zionist test anybody could take, and most people don't even realize that they're
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a Zionist, but the quickest Zionist test anybody could take is, do you believe Israel has a
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And if you say yes, mazel tov, you're a Zionist.
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And, you know, I got a message from one of the readers yesterday, and she said to me,
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I finished reading the book, and, you know, this part about You Are Not Alone, when we're
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getting to that, I know that you meant it for Jewish people, but I have to say, it really
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I meant it for anybody who has a shred of humanity in them, because I can guarantee
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you, you can be any religion, any color, any heritage, any ethnicity, and this book is
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Just be careful who you sit next to on an airplane, because one of the readers was crying
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next to somebody who did not quite know how to comfort them through this.
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Let me ask you about the hopefulness of it, because one of the challenges in a time like
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I mean, if anything, you know, the public sympathy for Israel from people that might not identify
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as a Zionist was at a high point on October 7th, October 8th.
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And I think it's been in decline ever since then.
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And I think, you know, people often very dishonestly conflate, you know, oh, I have this
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No, you actually have a deep hatred of the Jewish people.
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You're a synagogue in Toronto and Benjamin Netanyahu's in his war cabinet.
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Yeah, yeah, he doesn't even, you know, know what Yonge Street is and you're out there and
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you're in, you know, Forest Hill and all of that.
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Because, you know, with any sort of, you know, boiling crisis like this, the fear is that
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We're seeing open calls for violence on the street.
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And at this point, people are faced with two options.
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They can either do something about it or they can literally do the Christopher Elon thing,
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do the ostrich thing, stick your head in the sand and say, oh, I wasn't in Ottawa.
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Like, like at that point, it's you can't make it more apparent than these people already have.
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The hiding thing isn't hiding, it's aiding and abetting.
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I think that things, especially this past weekend, I saw the surge and I see the surge
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I get people have like measured nooses for my neck.
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I've had so many horrid things said to me online, but there was a person just near where
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I live who saw me, gave me a dirty look and called me a Nazi.
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Quick to run, mind you, because that's what they do.
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I love how defending Jews has become Nazism in 2024.
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I mean, they show how devoid of historic, historic knowledge and just, you know, basic
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And I took the word Zionist also for the book, because one, its meaning is powerful and true.
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And two, they're trying to take the word Zionist away from us.
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And this is where the Jewish people have failed themselves in fighting something like this,
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which we've known for many, many years has been coming.
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There has been an ongoing Palestinian campaign that is very centralized and everybody has their
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documents and everybody has their way of speaking.
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And there's a very clear path and it is being executed exceptionally well.
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Meanwhile, you have so many different Jewish organizations, each trying their own thing,
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And it's just ending up being a lot of noise instead of cohesiveness.
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So, this entire idea of the war that is not in the field, but the war that is in the real world,
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And for me, I look at that in a couple of folds.
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And by my people, I'm not referring to Jewish people.
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I'm referring to Jewish people and our non-Jewish supporters.
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And I think that the strength that is found in this book from the people who have been
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at the most bitter, bitter points of darkness in their lives, the things that have happened to
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Another was on his way to terrorist camp to become a terrorist.
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So, when you look at what these people have been through, and also a very special story about my
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father because he sacrificed everything to change Canada so that people could get jobs regardless
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of religion, which ended up hurting him much more later on.
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But when you look at the hardships, the tragedies, the how are they going to get out of this,
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and these true stories, and not only how they made it through, but how they made it through to become
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exceptional successes who thrived beyond measure.
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And I will say, if you've ever seen Inglourious Basterds, the last person that I highlight as a
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Holocaust survivor in this book, Dr. Morris Schnitzer, it will give you a little bit of that
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I'm not going to give anything away there, but really the whole point of this is, I think that's one
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side of the battle is helping people, empowering people, Jews, and our non-Jewish supporters.
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My second edition is going to be longer in audiobook, in paperback, and then this whole
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Dear Zionist is going to move on towards other series as well.
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But first, we have to work on strengthening people.
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And the other side is we have to become more cohesive.
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We have to create more of a singular vision in how we're going to tackle this the same way that
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the PR on the other side has been working it for years, for years, for years, for years.
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But we've also learned from Israelis and Jewish people, we can be very innovative,
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And I've always tremendously admired the resilience of Israelis.
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But you have to extend that to Jewish people now.
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And people that go around the world in this day and age and wear a yarmulke, walk into a synagogue,
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I mean, they're doing that knowing full well what that attracts.
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The book from Dahlia Kurtz called Dear Zionist, You Are Not Alone.
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You can get that over on her website, DahliaKurtz.com.
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Andrew, can I just mention quickly, you bought this book from me.
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Usually you send media a book and that's just how it is.
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You didn't even ask me for a copy like everybody else.
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Worth every penny, but I will say, I mean, I, when I worked in, in daily radio, I used,
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Like it was, it got to the point where it was almost like, um, you know, like the letters
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in Harry Potter and the, where they just keep coming, like all these books, like books would
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just show up and I've never like asked for them or ordered them.
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And then once I wrote a book for the first time, I was like, no, I can't afford to just give
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And now I always, I always support my friends by buying the books.
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So I want to know from the book at the end, you tell me your favorite quote, no pressure
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It's always, you pick one from the middle so that everyone knows you read it and didn't
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