The Problem With Jon Stewart - Group Therapy: Talking WWIII, Lab Leaks, and Pedro Pascal

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Exciting news: We’ve got new TV episodes starting March 3! To celebrate, Jon is joined this week by executive producer and showrunner Brinda Adhikari, senior research producer Susan Helvenston, and staff writer Kasaun Wilson to discuss the stories we’ve been following and the anxiety they’ve given us. Plus, they chat about the news that the COVID-19 virus may actually have leaked from a lab in China, whether we’re on the brink of World War III, and other fun, breezy topics. New episodes start streaming March 3 on Apple TV+.CREDITS
Hosted by: Jon Stewart Featuring, in order of appearance: Brinda Adhikari, Kasaun Wilson, Susan Helvenston Executive Produced by Jon Stewart, Brinda Adhikari, James Dixon, Chris McShane, and Richard Plepler.Lead Producer: Sophie EricksonProducers: Zach Goldbaum, Caity Gray Assoc. Producer: Andrea BetanzosSound Engineer: Miguel CarrascalSenior Digital Producer: Freddie MorganDigital Producer: Cassie MurdochDigital Coordinator: Norma HernandezSupervising Producer: Lorrie BaranekHead Writer: Kris Acimovic Elements Producer: Kenneth HullClearances Producer: Daniella PhilipsonSenior Talent Producer: Brittany MehmedovicTalent Manager: Marjorie McCurryTalent Coordinator: Lukas ThimmSenior Research Producer: Susan Helvenston Theme Music by: Gary Clark Jr.The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast is an Apple TV+ podcast, produced by Busboy Productions.https://apple.co/-JonStewart

Look, Brenda, I've said this before, if you just toast the English muffin and you just crisp it up a little bit, it's going to do you so much. The bagel is too much bread. Right. Listen, you and I, as I said, if we ever part ways, it'll be because of the bagel and the English muffin debate because I am fully entrenched in the bagel category and he is fully entrenched in the English muffin. It's just not a sandwich bagel. Here we go. My favorite part of this job is watching John give bagels the same intensity he gives Fox News.

That's right. All right, friends, we got a podcast here. It's the problem with John Stewart, who is the problem. It is finally here. The Apple TV Plus show is back. New episodes start on March 3rd. That's this Friday. I don't know when you're listening to this. It could be last Friday because you're fucking lazy and you're not up on your podcast and you're all of a sudden, you're like, oh, I got to listen to this Alec Murdoch case. No, you're staying with us here. To celebrate, we're going to be talking about the upcoming episodes with the people who help make these upcoming episodes. It's the lovely town of Brindadikari, our executive producer

and showrunner. Hey. Extraordinary. Susan Helvinson, senior research producer. Hi. So you can do two things in this world. You can google something or you can ask Susan. As Denzel once said, Google, ain't got nothing on me. And then, of course, Kason Wilson, our staff writer and our office poll maker. What's happening, John? What is the poll this week, Kason?

If one person has to go in their entire career, who would you choose? And the options were Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise. Wait, wait, they'd have to go like... Their entire career, gone. They've never been born. This is, it's a wonderful life. They've never been born. Yes, they've never been born. All of their work is gone. Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise. I don't want any part of this.

It's hard. Yeah, I'd have to go with Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts did this. You and the majority of the office. The majority of the office chose Julia Roberts. Wow. And the only reason, and that is in no way a slight on Julia Roberts and her million-dollar smile. But it's merely got to do with, I think, the plurality of her movies are less appealing to me.

You don't really care to watch Eat, Pray, Love, again. I've got it so committed to memory that I don't, you could even remove it. I get it. The best part about being in an office this week is that you'll hear somebody being like, Ron DeSantis said what? And then in the background, you'd be like, I'm not losing Devil Wears Brottle. It's been a very fiery debate here. Equal priority as far as outrage is concerned.

But more importantly, I want the audience at home to know that we don't just sit around arguing movies and polls. We work at least 30 to 45 minutes a day. And there's in between trying to figure out the best bread for our breakfast sandwiches and the movies. There is also work to be done. But this season coming up, we got crime and guns. We talked to General David Petraeus about the military industrial complex.

Turns out he's more for it than I think we were. But we're going to have inflation. Larry Summers will be on the program. I will say this about those one-on-one interviews. I don't care for them. You like you have so much fun, though. We love listening to them. Well, I'm very pleased that you do because I find it.

It's like having six Thanksgiving dinners with relatives you don't get along with. In a row. What else we got? You know, we're all talking about World War III. One episode this year is going to be about what are the teams going to be? And who's going to be providing what? And we talked to the foreign ministers of Germany and England and our own State Department and the EU. And we're going to choose teams.

See who's got next. Who needs Julia Roberts for Eat Pray Love when we got John for Eat Pray War? Our staff has been talking about a lot of these things that have just been pertinent to our episode. We've been talking about crime. We've been talking about defense. We've been talking about international things that are going on impending World War III. So John, actually news is coming out every day about it. We should talk about some of the stories going on.

It's crazy. Right. So our first episode coming up is crime and guns. And I'll tell you a little bit of the, well, how would you say the beginnings of it? The etiology of it? Would that be the correct? The provenance. The origin story.

The origin story. I like that. Give it a little superhero. Mm-hmm. Nice little Marvel. That's right. So I'm sitting at home and watching, as most people do, watching the Bachelor in Paradise during the midterms.

And every commercial break were the advertisements for the candidates that were running. And especially in New York, the Lee Zeldin advertisements were all about the chaos and crime that had been unleashed on the streets of New York City. And so what you do with that is you go in and you say to Susan, Susan, can you go back and look and see if the tools that the police need to solve gun crimes have been neutered by right wing legislation? And then 26 seconds later when she gives me a report back from 1977 about everything that's been done since Reagan, I'll say something like, doesn't this new influx of guns make

police lives more endangered? And before I say the word endangered, she has a generally a five page sheet of things about permitless concealed carry and weakened restrictions on civilian guns and how that makes police lives more dangerous. And then it goes from there. But it generally starts with a spark of this seems utterly crazy to me, but nobody seems to be addressing it. That's how did you guys feel when you were watching all these?

Oh my God, America is now a crime ridden gun infested hellhole. Did that did that strike you in any way that it was the Republicans taking the high ground? Uh, so here's what I'll say. It always bothers me how much how normalized dog was one is. It just bothers me so much. It made me so mad because when you whenever you hear politicians talk, they're like, we don't want to be like Chicago. We don't want to be New York.

We don't want to be Atlanta. It's like, it's like they find every synonym for black except for black. And Chicago now a synonym for black. 100% that's exactly what it because like politicians are like, remember when your neighborhood used to look like whole milk and all that caffeine started moving in and it's keeping you up at night. It's like, come on, man. Just just say remember when your lacrosse team was safe and then the Harlem Globetrotters

moved in and it's like, come on, man. And like, stop, stop doing that. We know what you're doing. Just be straight. You know what's amazing to me case on is when, you know, there's this wild nostalgia from people like Sean Hannity and Tucker P. Carlson. And it's always, you know, this country has changed, man. It was, it used to be great.

And the time they're referring to is when they were kids, when I was growing up. And the first thing you want to say is, right, because you were a fucking child. You were a child. And so if you lost a tooth, $10 appeared under your pillow. Yes, that's, it was an amazing magical world. But the best part of it is when they start talking about how politics and Democrats ruin things, what's the decade they go to first? The 70s.

They always go to the decade that they're talking about as when this country was great. It's when Carter was president and it was terrible. And then Reagan came in in the 80s and made that little error great again. But there's, there's just no consistency. But Brenda, you've been in the news business for a long time. What strikes me is the utter lack of curiosity on the part of the news media that just accept a narrative. Oh, Republicans are tough on crime and Democrats want our streets to be chaotic.

All the conversation was, will these attacks hurt Democrats? And none of the conversation was, aren't they the guys that are flooding our streets with guns? Yeah. And look, it's something you've said for a while now, which is that on the messaging part, you're going to go, you're going to lean into the thing that is a conflict ridden. That's the juicy headline that has the action in it. But the other part of this that was so fascinating to me is there is this broken conversation our country has around guns right now,

which is that we actually don't link it to the crime conversation. We only talk about guns in light of mass shootings. And while that's an incredibly important thing to do, I don't know how helpful it is that the only time progressives and liberals really get heated about guns is when they talk about assault weapon bans or when they talk about great sweeping changes. I think one of the things that I was excited about is us acknowledging that there's a second amendment, us saying that there could be a second amendment and people can have their guns. But you cannot assume that loosening restrictions is going to make this country more safe.

And so that to me is just a different kind of way of looking at it. And I hope that people see that. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that you said very early on, John, that stuck with a lot of us was that inconvenience is not infringement. And whenever we have the conversation around guns, it seems like the rhetoric that we use for that is somehow different than absolutely every other part of life.

Shall not be infringed. Right. It's the only thing that we seem to not be able to talk about. And one of the craziest things with the crime conversation that made me really excited about this episode was the iron pipeline. Because during the elections, you kept hearing about Chicago, New York, California, these crime-ridden places where violence happens every day. You can't even leave your house.

But in reality, when our team started looking into that, it was like the guns that are popping up in those places are largely not coming from those places. In California, half of the guns come from states that have weaker gun laws. In New York, I think it's like 80% of guns are coming from places like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina. Ultimately, the guns that are showing up at crime scenes are coming from states that have weaker gun laws. Right.

The Baltimore, we're talking to the Chief of Police. And we're like, how did the guns get there? What are the gun stores like? He goes, we don't have any gun stores? We don't have any gun stores in Baltimore? What do you think? We're crazy? There is one gun store in Baltimore proper.

And it is called the Cop Shop. And it only caters to law enforcement and first responders. Can I just tell, I want to let the audience know very quickly, you just got help instant. Yes, you did. That's when you'll be in the middle of a discussion and you're like, there's no gun stores in Baltimore. And then Susan will be like, well, actually, if I may just interject very quickly. There are no real gun stores, but I just think the Cop Shop is too good not to mention.

It's crazy how much we celebrate and fight for guns. Like, we're making it now to where there's more restrictions to drive to a mass shooting than to actually conduct it yourself. You might have to go, you have to go to the MV, you have to register for a license, you have to do so much to drive to a mass shooting than it is to just go buy guns. Same day. It's like all of these restrictions are really crazy. Same day.

Same day. And now, not only are we like fighting for guns, but we're like celebrating it in a way. Like, I don't know if you guys saw, but... It's a virtue. Absolutely. It's a virtue. It shows courage. There's legislation to make the AR-15, the National Gun of America, which is like the

stupidest thing you can possibly do. And of course, the three co-sponsors are Lauren Bobert, Andrew Clyde, and our good friend, George Santos. Something he believes in. Can I tell you who's not going to be happy if the AR-15 is the National Gun of America will be the American Bald Eagle? Because I have a feeling the one who will suffer the consequences of that will be our national bird. But it is shocking.

So apparently, all of your rights are infringable in enormous ways. If they don't have the four words, shall not be infringed. Right, yep. Comfortable infringing speech, comfortable infringing, almost anything else. Like, don't say gay, drag shows, I'm much more scared of Rand Paul than RuPaul. But that's a bumper sticker waiting to happen. Well, the thing we keep engaging with is a good guy with a gun can tackle a bad guy with a gun. But ultimately, we're at the place now where there's enough guns for one for every person

and then some. So when do you get to the point where it's enough guns for safety? And a lot of these shootings, these are not crime. These are domestic disputes. These are people who know each other, who are mad for a short period of time and end up doing these things. And as far as the cops, it makes them incredibly more in danger because we have an arms race, which leads us to the next episode that's coming out the week after that,

which is about the military industrial complex. That's right. You know, John, to get into that, I want to first talk about something that's kind of stressing me out. I need a little therapy from y'all right now because in this job, we do a lot of research and we find out all these things. And in doing it, you start to just look at all these connections that are potentially being made and it kind of stresses you out.

So, so, so, John, I'm going to lay out a few breadcrumbs and you're going to tell me if there's any reason that these breadcrumbs are connected. Okay. It starts with the China spy balloon incident for me. Okay. That happened what February? Early February. Early February, right?

I don't really care about like we spy on them, they spy on us. I get that like that part I'm okay with because you that's the sort of price of admission in the world we live in. The thing that freaked me out is when we blew it up. So, we blew up that spy balloon, right? Soon after, then we cancel that trip to China, right? Because we're like, we ain't talking to them. Then we have this security conference in Munich.

Stay with me. Stay with me. We have a security conference in Munich, okay? At that security conference in Munich, we are talking to their foreign minister and then we go on the news in America and say, you know what? They're thinking about giving weapons to Russia. The Chinese are thinking about giving weapons to Russia. And now we have a situation where I'm freaked out if that's true or not.

And it's making me think about this kind of hot pot of a world hot pot. This kind of cauldron, this like tinder box. I love hot pot. Back on food. Yeah. No, it feels like. Wonderful family dinner. It feels like with Russia and Ukraine and the alliances that are being cleaved as a result of it.

And China kind of getting pissed off at us and us pissed off at them. That there's these entrenched alliances and all it needs is one freaking Santa Anna gust of wind or a little errant cigarette to just drop in and that's what it feels like. It feels like we're a tinder box right now. And I'm scared. All right, go. Now what's my role in this? Make her feel better.

You've laid out a convincing case that we are escalating tension with China. Would you like me to talk you down? A little bit. Well, so here's. Okay, I'll give you one other piece, which I went down a rabbit hole in the last couple of days. And that it then will be my end freak out. I went down a rabbit hole about World War One. And one of the things I read about World War One, which again, it's just a theory,

but there's a theory about the alliances that were already in place. Yeah, right? That you had Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russia and Britain and all that, right? And the whole point of the United Nations and NATO and those groups is that you have these alliances that aren't secret. In other words, you draw the lines indelibly so that people know if I cross over that, that means that that's an act of aggression and an act of war. That's the whole point of sort of stating them out loud.

Right. Well, so with this one, what it made me realize was it wasn't just the sort of assassination of this random ass Archduke like heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Right. By the way, random ass Archduke, what's his nickname? I'm like, who the fuck cares about this guy? I mean, I'm sad that he's dead. But like, who the fuck cares about Franz Ferdinand?

No, he was just an excuse for these people. I think the Ferdinand family would take real exception to this. All right. You know what? May he rest in peace. At the time people cared, I think. May the spirit of Franz Ferdinand rest in peace. But all I'm saying is that it feels like there's no agent out there who's de-escalating.

And no one out there to me feels like they're really speaking the language of somebody who doesn't want to engage in conflict right now. What you're saying is you're feeling an inevitability to an escalation that will be worldwide. Yes, that is exactly right. Is it inevitability or uncertainty? Because I think what's scary to me right now is the uncertainty that it feels like there's this thing happening in Ukraine.

It's not just about Ukraine though, right? It's about all of Europe. It's about our role in the world. It's about which side China's on. It's about what Russia's going to do next. Putin's sitting here waiting to see what we're going to do. China's sitting here waiting to see how much will we punish Putin? How much will we not punish Putin?

What could they potentially get away with? To me, it's the uncertainty of what happens next. And how long does this go on for? And if our presidential election has some kind of change to our leadership in this country, what does that look like if this stalemate goes on for another year and a half? And that a lot of this is potentially in response to the fact that we're about to go into an election year. And it just feels like we're making decisions based on political calculations.

What? How dare you? I know it's a shocking revelation. So let's start back with your original provocation. All right. And look, it's like anything else. We can do this with Israel policy and we can do it with anything. You go back, you can pick a moment in time and assume that that's the onset or that's the inflection point.

But the truth is, these are tensions that have been building ever since in terms of China, especially since we opened economic relations in the 1970s. We shot the balloon down because the news media got ahold of it. And apparently these balloons have been around all the time. But once it was seen, whether it was blown off course or whatever it was, something, they demanded action. And some administrations are confident enough to stand up and say, not the right move. We don't want to escalate it.

And they explain it to the American people in a way maybe that treats them like adults. But in the crucible of 24-hour news cycles and Twitter trolling and all these other things, I think you're seeing an escalation in narrative resolvment. Yes. Like everyone has to have the narrative resolved. And the way to resolve this one to show strength was, I shot it down. Why did you shoot it down over the sea? And then they invent a whole thing that this balloon could have killed millions.

00:21:27,120 --> 00:21:27,680 Right. If you were to shoot it down in Montana, who God knows where the shrapnel would have gone. The fact that we started calling it a spy balloon from day one. That's right. So they created a narrative around it. I think the larger kind of tectonic plates are shifting as they always are in this world. As it's been since, I guess forever, we'll start with the inflection point of World War One,

which is totalitarian governments versus democratic governments. And who's got the upper hand. But in truth, the world is so much more interconnected economically right now. It'd be really difficult. It's hard to go to war with your best customer. I think that's right on. And that actually takes me to this headline over the weekend, which is that the Department of Energy came out with a report saying that they have low

confidence that the COVID-19 was a result of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They think it was a lab leak. So this came from the Energy Department, which if you were to read the headlines, you might think that the Energy Department was the White House. But the Energy Department is one of many agencies with a theory on this, which means that really our own government doesn't even agree. But this was interesting because someone we know, John, has had a similar theory or gotten some heat over a similar theory in the past.

My phone was blowing up over the weekend just being like, is John gloating about this? Do you feel vindicated? Are you trying to get me canceled again? No, there is no. The first of all, I wasn't waiting for the Department of Energy. You were refreshing the Department of Energy feed. The larger problem with all of this is the inability to discuss things that are within

the realm of possibility without falling into absolutes and litmus testing each other for our political allegiances as it arose from that. My bigger problem with that was, and for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, God bless you if you don't. I had gone on Stephen Colbert's show. Stephen is a young, up-and-coming improv actor. He'll make it. And just really very wide hips, surprisingly.

But the point was, I was doing a bit about, and it was similar to a bit I've done on religion. I used to do a bit about religion, saying religion is giving comfort to a world torn apart by religion. So the idea was about the vaccines and other things that science had truly helped heal a world from a pandemic, probably called by science. And then I proceeded to go on a kind of a long tangent about why that, why I thought that. I thought it was a pretty good bit that expressed kind of how I felt. And the two things that came out of it were, I'm racist against Asian people, and how dare I align myself with the alt-right.

And I thought, well, that's such a peculiar, and the backlash was swift, immediate, and quite loud. And again, I didn't take that personally either. Like, we live in a world where, like, I have my opinions, I'm not mad at the backlash either because they're doing what I was doing, which is expressing myself. The part that I don't like about it is the absolutes and the dismissive, like, fuck you, I'm done with you. I will never forgive you. You have crossed an unforgivable line. You've expressed an opinion that is antithetical to mine or not mine. And it may not be one that has any real ramifications of anything.

I was just saying, this seems like it's a pretty good possibility, which, by the way, has happened before. But what was stunning to me, I think was the anger. That's the part of all of this. And it's purposeful. Well, I think the thing that we discovered after that happened was, you know, that natural transmission means you're a Democrat, and wet market means you're a Democrat, and lab leak means you're a Republican. And we were really puzzled by that. Well, you were literally, though, like, I had put Hillary for prison on my forehead. I'd just gone out there with...

Can I just say... I think a big part of it is what we've been talking about, which is like, we live in a huge narrative machine. And in a time and place where news is supposed to cut through the ifs of our society, they're creating more of them. It's like, I am a comedian. I am telling a joke that if you look at, there is a deeper meaning behind it. But because the news cannot create informed members of society, they're creating people who can build on narratives that they need for their own political agenda. Now we're not creating people who can sift through what is really going on.

Now we're creating people who are just building more soldiers for the war. And it's like... That's it. Building soldiers for the war is the perfect fucking analogy for that. The crazy thing, Kay, is we've never had more speech and more information, and yet the amount of viewpoints have narrowed. So we have more speech and less of a spectrum amongst that. Everything now, nuance is for cucks. And it all comes down to a black and white, Hobbesian, whatever they call that viewpoint of the world. Nasty and brutish.

Nasty and brutish. It's like, why can't we have these conversations? It's one of the reasons why politics is such a hard conversation for me to have and why I just choose to watch Frasier every night. It's because of Asia. Wow, that's a blast from the past. It's the theme song. It's like, who doesn't love scrambled eggs? But there's not just a hypocrisy that you guys absolutely need to watch out for, but there's also the discussion of infrastructure that because we're weaponizing these narratives,

we can never have the conversations of why we can't build American infrastructure. Like, listen, if we can do all of these things for defense, that's great. The conversation is not about that. It's that we have the resources to build American infrastructure. Great. We can weaponize. We can do things if we want to, don't say gay. We don't want trans. We don't want drag. If this is what, if this is the narrative that you want to create, it shows that if you want to do something about gun control, if you want to do something about gun violence, if you want to do something about all these other things that we're saying is destroying our society, we have the power to do it. If you have this much money to give the

Department of Defense, you have that to build our schools, to build our roads, to build, to give clean water to Flint, Michigan. Like, we have that to do it. And it's like, why, why do we always have to stand in a way? Based on that, the country is not incentivized for those solutions. The country doesn't understand that solving those problems is investment, is strengthening. That's what it is. It's, it's strengthening and its investment in human capital. Whereas, look, if poor people had the lobbyists that Raytheon had, boy, they'd be getting a better slice of the deal. And, you know, the system is set up. And I think it, it really, I think metastasized when

you start getting into Citizens United and how money really supercharged a lot of this kind of corruption within politics. And when you start tossing around that kind of money in that kind of a system, you will see the withering of those areas. I mean, listen, it's never been easy to sell infrastructure and human capital to people anyway, but those will wither. And right now, military industrial complex is king. Media industrial complex is king. And the two of those systems work hand in glove to create the incentives. You have to look at what are the incentives of this system to de-escalation. And the answer is none. I think, I think that's spot on. And I look at the two overarching storylines right now, right? It's World War three and it's

election 2024. And we are right now, every narrative, to me, is hurtling towards the platforming of those two realities. And I even look at just going back to lab leak for one second. The reason that actually, for me, adds to my anxiety about global stability right now. People will use it as pretext. Right. Look at what Representative Mike Gallagher is going to do this week, all right? And by the time this podcast airs, he will have done it. He is holding a House subcommittee hearing on the Chinese Communist Party. And in it, he's going to bring this up. He's going to bring up that like the lab leak came out of China, right? Or that there's one intelligence agency

that's saying that. And he's going to add that. Not even intelligence, it's the energy department. Well, the intelligence wing of the energy, which by the way, I don't know that every wing has like, does the agriculture agency have an intelligence wing? I don't know. I'm sure they do. The CIA of the DOE. Nobody fucking knows. Nobody will know. But it's a possibility and a pretty decent one. Oh no, 100%. But what I'm vibing right now is that I don't trust the environment we're in to do the right thing with that information, which is the right thing to do with that information, is to make sure our freaking labs are going to run safe all over the world. Behind the scenes, they are revisiting a lot of the rules around gain of function or what's considered

gain of function. The idea, look, I've been talking about this for 30 years. The idea that scientists, as we always say, curiosity killed the cat. We're the cat in many ways because we're the ones, we do what we can do. It's CRISPR. It's everything else. I'm not suggesting that we don't progress technologically, but we have to always understand that almost everything that we make, that betters our lives, someone else is attempting to weaponize. That's the yin and yang. It's always been that way. And we have to be a society that's cognizant of safeguards. And you brought up a really interesting word, Brenda, pretext. And I think pretext is escalation and context is de-escalation. And the thing that our media is unable to do and unwilling to do because they're lazy,

sensationalistic little fucks is context because context takes the perspective. It's, you know, Tracy and I were talking about this last night and the worrisome nature of the world. And I was trying to, you know, soothe by saying, look, when I was growing up, we had great people and we killed all of them, all of them. And we were in a war for no fucking reason for a decade where thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Vietnamese died. And we poisoned their country and we poisoned our own people. And we still haven't reckoned with the fallout, literal fallout, from all of those wars. This instability is part of our, we live on a fault line. And we crave it.

Jenna, I need you to find better pillow talk. It came after The Last of Us. We had just watched a zombie apart, which, by the way, forget about all our episodes. Fucking The Last of Us is so good. I knew it was coming. Good, I gotta watch it. Oh, dear God. Pedro Pascal is so fucking good. So good. Very handsome.

It is so good. So everybody's night is doing research for World War III and The Last of Us. That's what we're doing as a staff. That's what we've come to. When we leave work at the end of the day, we need to rot our brains a little bit. We talk about this, I leave work and I'm like, I need to watch Love Island or The Last of Us. I'll say one thing is, Susan, and it's one of the things we learned when we were researching our defense episode was this idea that we put so much more money into our military than we do

into our diplomatic court. Into our diplomatic court. Yeah, right. What to me feels- 10 to 1. Yeah, and when you have that reality, how can war not be inevitable? You're putting so much less money into negotiations and talk. Right.

And again, it also feels like these days, negotiations and talk have a really bad reputation in the world. Like you're considered a fucking pussy if that's what you want to do, right? Look, the reason why we're having so much trouble with China is, I think, pretty simple. Their economy has awoken, it has matured, and they are now an economic rival like has never been seen in this country to us. And the thing that I think we're trying to come to grips with is this idea that, well, if the world order isn't built on the dollar and we can't control and influence events

through sanctions or withholding those dollars, because ultimately, I think that's what this feels like is, do I think Xi Jinping really gives a fuck about Vladimir Putin? No, but I imagine he sees it as an opportunity to give the United States a black eye and to weaken the foundation of American economic hegemony so that we have less options when it comes to influencing. And by the way, they've been doing that with their Belt and Road in Africa for a couple of decades and cornering markets to the point where now we're like, what about Mars? Maybe we could get some of this shit up.

Maybe that cobalt is on Mars. Right. I find it very hard to believe that America is acting this way because of its moral standing in the world. Come on. It's also very interesting to me because the international fights that we're having now seem to be such an outlier, but it's almost a microcosm of some of the fights that we're having domestically.

Absolutely. We're having the same fight between fighting more over Republican narratives than four American people. I don't see much of a difference between Florida and Russia. Look at the language that Putin is using. Yeah. Don't say gay. We're going to be.

I mean, it's the same. Yeah. It's using DeSantis's platform. The playbook. Yeah. I don't know if we'll get into World War III before we get into Civil War II. Oh, man. Well, there are certain people that wouldn't mind that.

I got to end on that. That was beautiful. That was cool. That was cool, yeah. You know, but excellent guys. As always, please check out our show. Brenda, Susan, Kason, the problem is airing on Apple TV Plus. What is it?

Brenda, March 3rd? March 3rd, our first episode this week. What happens in this first episode is we buy a soccer team in England. That's right. And we make some delicious shortbread cookies. Yes. And if you tune in, you'll not only will you learn something, you'll open up your heart a little bit if you watch our show.

Wow. Okay. Okay. Yeah. 00:37:19,920 --> 00:37:20,480 It's a very. It's wholesome. It's wholesome.

Positive and affirming episode for these very, very stressful and difficult times. And my mustache in our episodes is extraordinary. Believe. Believe. All right, kitties. I will see you guys. Bye-bye. Bye.

The Prima John Stuart podcast is an Apple TV plus podcast and a joint bus boy production.