Today we take for granted that everyday Americans can invest on Wall Street at an affordable price, but Joe Ricketts helped make that happen. He founded Ameritrade with just $12,500 borrowed from friends and family, and through risk-taking and perseverance grew it into a company now worth $30 billion. He joined the show this week to discuss his journey and what it says about America’s free-enterprise system.

Joe Ricketts is the founder, former CEO, and retired chairman of online brokerage TD Ameritrade. He is also the author of the new book, “The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get: An Entrepreneur’s Memoir.“

“Globalism” has become an epithet to leaders across the world like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. But not to Dalibor Rohac, author of the new book, “In Defense of Globalism,” which advocates an alternative, cosmopolitan conservative tradition, in contrast to the more nationalist turn sweeping the West in recent years. He makes the case for global institutions such as the EU and answers globalism’s critics in the first half of this show.

Then, why is Britain gearing up for another election? Will the Brexit saga ever end? And can the Tories expect to capture the sweeping majority that eluded Theresa May in 2017? Dalibor addresses these questions and more.

Spurred on by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Rachel Carson, the policymakers in the twentieth century enacted numerous ambitious reforms to curb environmental degradation. But many policies came with a high opportunity cost in lost economic growth.

Larry Selzer, president and CEO of The Conservation Fund, joined the show this week to discuss approaches to conservation that bridge this impasse.

Michael Rubin returns to the show to analyze the ongoing events in Syria and provide a greater perspective on Turkey’s relationship with the Kurds. We also discuss what a post-Erdogan Turkey could look like, how Assad and Iran might react to Turkish troops invading Syria, and what the United States’ overriding objective in the Middle East should be.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researches Arab politics, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Iran, Iraq, the Kurds, terrorism, and Turkey. He concurrently teaches classes on terrorism for the FBI and on security, politics, religion, and history for US and NATO military units.

Columns and commentary today are filled with references to the crumbling liberal world order and the resurgence of populism, nationalism, or some odious combination of the two. But what was this liberal, rules-based system, and how long did it truly reign? AEI visiting scholar Colin Dueck returned to Banter to discuss in light of his forthcoming book, “Age of Iron: On Conservative Nationalism.“

Colin discusses the history and trajectory of US foreign policy since the founding, and the evolution of the international since World War II. Then, how does conservative nationalism manifest itself in foreign affairs, and is it an authentic representation of voters’ desires, or an elite project carried out in spite of an opposed or at least apathetic public? Finally, we close with a few questions on the future of US relations with China, Russia, and the European Union.

The phrase “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act” doesn’t exactly still beating hearts — and yet that provision may be responsible for the internet as we know it. So argues Jeff Kosseff in his new book, “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet.” By stating that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” Section 230 has allowed the proliferation of platforms like Facebook and YouTube that rely on user-generated content.

But recently many politicians on both the right and left have started questioning Section 230’s merits. On this episode, we talked with Jeff about what role Section 230 has played in the development of the modern internet, and what could happen if the government significantly alters it. We also discussed alleged social media censorship and bias in Silicon Valley, antitrust concerns about Big Tech, and much more.

“For perhaps the first time in living memory,” writes Nick Eberstadt in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, “Team Kim is being outmaneuvered by the Americans in their zero-sum contest.” What has gone wrong with North Korean negotiations in the past, and why might that now be changing? Dr. Eberstadt joined us to discuss.

We also cover the ongoing tensions between South Korea and Japan, the toll the US sanctions are taking on the North Korean economy, and whether the Kim family really believes the Marxist-Leninist “Hegelian mumbo jumbo” their regime spouts.

“Why can’t we just do what they do in Europe?”

Anyone who has spent time discussing college in the United States has probably heard this sentiment before, or thought it themself. Well, the US could move toward a Scandinavian model, or a South Korean model for that matter, but it would come with trade-offs. Jason Delisle and Preston Cooper explore these trade-offs in their new report, “International higher education rankings: Why no country’s higher education system can be the best.”