The Problem With Jon Stewart - Has America Learned Anything From Its Biggest Disasters? Not Really.
Episode Date: August 25, 2022Jon talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink, whose book Five Days at Memorial is the basis for the Apple TV+ series of the same name. They discuss why our healthcare system is a...lways ill-equipped for disasters—and whether there’s something else coming our way that we should panic about. Writers Robby Slowik and Maria Randazzo also stop by to talk about the Trump raid, the oddest menu items at Mar-a-Lago, and the scourge of lanternfliesCREDITSHosted by: Jon StewartFeaturing, in order of appearance: Robby Slowik, Maria Randazzo, Sheri FinkExecutive Produced by Jon Stewart, Brinda Adhikari, James Dixon, Chris McShane, and Richard Plepler.Lead Producer: Sophie EricksonProducers: Zach Goldbaum, Caity Gray, and Robby SlowikAssoc. Producer: Andrea BetanzosSound Engineer & Editor: Miguel CarrascalSenior Digital Producer: Frederika MorganDigital Coordinator: Norma HernandezSupervising Producer: Lorrie BaranekHead Writer: Kris AcimovicElements: Kenneth Hull, Daniella PhilipsonTalent: Brittany Mehmedovic, Marjorie McCurry, Lukas Thimm Research: Susan Helvenston, Andy Crystal, and Cassie MurdochTheme Music by: Gary Clark Jr.The Problem with Jon Stewart podcast is an Apple TV+ podcast produced by Busboy Productions.https://apple.co/-JonStewart
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Something on my mind lately has been these
crazy lanternflies.
Have you guys seen them?
Absolutely, they're all over Jersey.
By the way, beautiful.
They are so pretty, you don't want to kill them,
but unfortunately, you have to.
Can I tell you something?
Their beauty makes me wanna kill them more.
Oh.
Because I am jealous.
I am, I look at them and I say,
how dare you walk this earth with such grace?
They're like if a ladybug took ayahuasca.
Hey, welcome to our end of summer,
problem podcast with me, John Stewart.
We got our writers, Robbie Slogan, Maria Randazzo.
Let's see, we have a television show.
It's on Apple TV plus.
It's, you know, they gave us a new premiere date,
I believe, for the second season.
October 7th, the show comes back on Apple TV plus.
And in a bit, we're gonna be talking to
a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Dr. Sherry Fink.
And that is not to suggest, Robbie and Maria,
that neither of you are worthy
of the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, you are.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you, yeah, we keep applying.
Summer for me is always bittersweet.
It's when I have to bring all my classified documents
back home from my retreat.
I have obviously a retreat that I live at.
Yes.
It's a private community.
Beautiful.
It's inside, it's on a golf course.
It's a mini golf course, but it's still a golf course.
Okay, this sounds nice.
Do either of you possess any classified information
that you would like to disclose right now
that you've been holding on to?
Yeah, nothing classified, but lots of stuff
I've stolen from places I used to work, you know?
Plenty of that stuff.
Okay, all right.
What would you, have you ever had when you left a job,
your former employer come to you and say,
hey, fucking give me that back?
Wait, yes.
Okay, Maria, go.
So this is less of a job,
more of a, I was in a musical in college.
And...
First of all, bless your heart.
I'd like to know the name of the musical
and the role you played.
You know the musical.
It's Cinderella, classic Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Wow.
They kind of blew up the world a little bit.
We were all fairy tale characters,
so I played Little Miss Muffet.
This was like an Avengers.
I'm gonna ask you a question.
I want you to answer this as honestly as you possibly can.
Sure.
Did you steal a Tuffet?
Is that what we're dealing with here?
I stole a Tuffet.
You son of a, son of a bitch.
And the Kurds in white.
You know how hard those are to come by?
That's what I said.
So you joined the play.
Yeah.
You put on the production.
Put on the production, production ends.
Okay.
The costume designer hits me up and he's like,
hey, you took the cold cream that removed the makeup.
How low budget of production are we talking about
where the guy is inventorying cold cream?
I know.
He ran a tight ship.
He ran a real tight ship.
Did you have to walk of shame it back to the theater
department?
I did.
Did you come back with cold cream?
I was like, here's your jar of ponds.
I'm not sure how we got here from classified materials,
but I enjoyed that story very much.
Anytime.
And Robbie, I'm sure you've stolen shit.
Ah, nonstop.
One of the last jobs that ended up ending unceremoniously,
I was working for you.
Oh yeah, in Red Bank.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you said, you were like, you guys just take the laptops.
Just take the fucking laptop.
That's right.
Yeah.
Everyone was having a bad day and John's like,
you know what, just take a laptop.
I hate to see sad people.
Yes.
But getting back to classified information,
I find that so mind blowing that the psychology of,
I know this is a secret that is crucial to the safety
and security of the United States of America,
but it's mine.
It's sociopathic.
And he keeps referring to everything that way.
These are my documents.
It's my stuff.
It's like, it's the people's stuff.
You know it's the people's stuff.
And he's just internalized mine.
Everything's mine because that's his worldview.
Well, I think he also treated the country
like it is the Trump organization.
It is because most people, you know,
if you run a public company,
you have shareholders, you have things.
In his, I always found this when I watched The Apprentice,
which I did always watch, by the way.
I enjoyed it very much.
Nobody fires meatloaf like Donald J. Trump.
Ouch.
But when he would sit there at the table
and he would have the two, it would be stereosiccophants.
And one on one side, one on the other.
Sometimes it was that older gentleman, George, I think.
Sometimes it was Ivanka.
Sometimes it was Don Jr.
And whatever happened on the show,
Donald Trump would do his thing and he would sit back.
Then he would turn to one side going.
That was, you know, that was tough.
And then whoever was on the right would be like,
you did the right thing, boss, great job.
Then the other person would be like,
what else could you have done?
That was a great decision.
And you realize, oh, his worldview is the right of kings.
I just want you to know that in this like podcast app,
I'm Maria and I are on either side of you,
just I'm nodding along with your point.
As you make it.
Yes, yes.
I have no shareholders.
See, that's how easy it is to turn into Hitler.
It's so quick to turn.
All you just need is two people who are agreeing.
Here's what I imagine at Mar-a-Lago,
where he keeps the classified documents.
You know, when you go to a hotel
and they have that little safe.
Yeah, yeah.
You think that's where he keeps everything?
In the, like, in one of the closets,
there's that little.
He's just got the little, yeah,
the little mini bar safe. By the ironing board.
And he just assumes that no spy will ever show up there
and go, what's Donald Trump's birthday?
Hey!
What do you know?
What do you think, Maria?
What I want to know is if any of this has disrupted
the seafood and saxophone night
that's held every Wednesday night at Mar-a-Lago on the patio.
Do they really do seafood and saxophone every Wednesday?
I went on their website.
I went on the Mar-a-Lago website
and in their dining section of their website,
it says, may I read you the breakdown?
I'd be honored. Please.
Okay, it's called six-star seafood night
every Wednesday evening on the patio in parentheses.
This dinner buffet features a sumptuous array
consisting of an appetizer table, two pound lobsters,
freshly grilled fish and meat items, salads,
and a dessert bar.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, hold on.
Meat items.
They've gone through so much, sumptuous, that thing.
Everything sounds amazing.
Meat items.
Meat items.
I think we've buried the lead here.
I'm a man who like specificity in my meat personally.
And I have never heard it called items.
Keep going, keep going.
Salads and a dessert bar accompanied
by a saxophonist under the stars.
I'm sorry, you know what that is?
That's not Mar-a-Lago, that's heaven.
You're right.
That is the dream.
And from what I understand in Mar-a-Lago,
like you do have free reign of the place.
Like all the seafood and saxophone people
can just kind of wander.
Like basically when you go down there,
you get a two pound lobster and nuclear codes.
Like whatever you want under the stars.
Remember the North Korea thing
when Shinzo Abe of Japan was there
and they were just looking at nuclear documents.
It was just sitting at a table.
On the Lido deck.
With their phone lights or something, is that right?
You know what, and what blows my mind
about this whole thing is everybody's got that thing like,
is this it?
Is this the thing?
And I keep trying to explain to people, no, no, it's not.
Like, why does anybody believe
that there will be accountability
in this man's life on this earth?
Right, there's been nothing up until this moment
to ever show anyone, including him.
And he's just trained to believe
that I can do anything I want.
How could he not feel that way?
He fucked a porn star while his wife was giving birth,
paid the porn star $130,000 to keep it quiet.
His wife is like, boys will be boys
and his lawyer goes to jail for it.
His accountant is going to jail.
Everybody around him goes to jail.
He's like the Mr. Magoo of absolved sins.
He just walks through this world and we never hold him.
You know what we are?
Oh, this is the worst thing that we are.
We're those parents.
You guys don't have kids yet,
but there are certain parents
that make a show of accountability.
Johnny, don't, I'm going to count to three.
And then nothing, that's who we are now.
We are literally like, Donald, what's behind your back?
Seriously.
Are those classified?
What's in the box?
Take it out of your mouth.
Donald.
Donald.
One, two, no more porn stars.
We're taking away the porn stars.
Donald.
If I get to three, we're doing a gentle raid.
I love it.
And I love, my favorite thing about the whole thing
is the things he puts out as exculpatory.
It's like, look, this is the warrant.
All it says is I have top secret documents.
It's like, O.J., Sims are going, look at this knife.
It's got a little blood on it, but I mean, come on.
Yeah.
He's only left with the dumbest people
in his orbit around him.
And they were just, it's own goal,
after own goal, after own goal.
Dear Lord.
So speaking of, and this is going to be a terrible transition,
but we are going to talk to someone
who is the antithesis of that, Dr. Sherry Fink.
After Katrina, she had written a book
about a hospital down there
where the infrastructure had failed
and they had to get people out of that hospital
and some of them died and like it was bad.
Horrible.
Anyway, that's a show now on Apple TV Plus.
And now it's like dramatized.
By the way, Maria, there's a great role in it
that I think you could play.
Oh, does it require toughets?
So I am going to introduce, if I may, Dr. Sherry Fink,
author of Five Days at Memorial,
Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital,
Dr. Sherry Fink.
As I called it, God knows how many years ago,
when Dr. Fink was on The Daily Show,
this has got to be turned into some type of film or movie.
It is now a mini series, Five Days at Memorial,
and it's available to stream on a streaming platform
called Apple Television.
And then there's a mathematical sign afterwards.
I believe it's a plus sign.
Dr. Fink, welcome.
You can call me Sherry Fink.
You can call me Sherry, John.
And it's Apple TV Plus sign.
That's what it was, plus.
I see that's why you're a scientist and a journalist.
And I'm just an idiot with a podcast.
But you called it, you called it.
So I should explain.
So I interviewed Dr. Fink
after you wrote the book about Katrina.
This was, I don't even remember what year this was.
What year did we speak on The Daily Show?
It was 2013 that we spoke.
My God, ages ago.
And first of all, tell a brief recap of the story
of what happened to this medical facility, Memorial,
after Katrina, during Katrina.
What was, give us the setting.
Sure, yes.
So it was 2005 and Hurricane Katrina came up the gulf
and in New Orleans were the failure
of the flood protection systems and the levies.
And this beloved city, it's like a bowl below sea level
and it's flooded.
And the city's medical centers,
pretty much all of them were vulnerable to flooding.
And so Five Days at Memorial is about one of these hospitals
and what happened in that situation.
How did they choose which patients to rescue first?
And as things grew more dire than issues of end of life,
what about patients they worried that they couldn't rescue?
And then all of the issues that were relevant
with this horrible disaster, the failure preparedness,
the failures of response, the vulnerable people,
different outcomes for different groups.
And so we explore all of that both in the series
and it's in the book as well.
I mean, it really was an ethics class come to life.
So much of what doctors learn obviously
is anatomy and physiology,
but there was also a part of medicine,
maybe less talked about or less prevalent,
about the ethics of medicine and being faced with situations
that it's a thought experiment.
And yet the thought experiment became reality at Memorial.
This idea that you triage the patients
that you believe are the most injured,
but also have the best ability to survive.
The doctors were faced with this situation,
no power, limited food and water.
And what were some of the decisions
that they were faced with and that they made?
Well, the first decision is very familiar to us,
I think with COVID because it has to do with
which patients get a share of a potentially life-saving resource
when you feel like there's not enough
for everybody right away.
I mean, we're seeing it with monkeypox right now
with like who gets the vaccine or the treatment.
So that's that triage question.
And surprisingly enough,
you can talk to people who went to medical school like me
and it's not something that we really learn about
how to do that, especially once patients are in a hospital.
And in this case, the resource was rescue helicopters.
They were arriving one at a time on the helipad
and there were well over 200 patients.
There were 2,000 people in this like two city block
long hospital complex.
And so start to do that thought experiment yourself.
And I think that's part of why we tell the story
is to think about not so much to judge these people
who were trapped in the situation, but what would I do?
Or what would I want done?
There are different ethical things to weigh here
and it's not really clear, but what is clear
is that decisions like this rationing in a way
have important ethical and value-laden types of implications
and then they can translate into who lives and who dies.
And too often, even in normal times,
we see rationing based on say ability to pay.
So we want these decisions to be made in a way
that is ethically defensible.
And that's really important because as we see,
we have analogs today with what we're going through.
So you're saying you're not looking
for an Eenie Meenie, Miney Moe situation.
Now to be clear for people who don't realize
they were evacuating people from the hospital,
not to the hospital.
The hospital was the building, the complex
that was in trouble.
I mean, the whole city obviously was in trouble,
but this hospital where you might normally look at,
similarly to what happened at the Superdome,
you sort of look at these facilities,
infrastructure facilities that you imagine
are built for this type of disaster to send people to.
What do you do when the facility that was built
for such a disaster is in fact the disaster itself?
It's such a good point.
I mean, this is why the larger issue here,
we can look at individual decision making,
which is really important because our infrastructure
is a mess and it is likely that any of us could be
a first responder de facto in our own communities
because we have these vulnerabilities to flooding,
to power outages, to earthquakes.
But you're right, the larger importance here
is we have to look at this infrastructure
and what do we need to do to make these hospitals
and flood prone areas hardened
so that they don't put people into these circumstances.
And in fact, there were helicopters that landed
that did try to bring patients to this hospital
because you're right.
In a disaster, we need our health infrastructure.
We need it in a pandemic.
We need it in a disaster like this.
So we need these hospitals to keep working,
not only for the people who are already in them,
but for people who might get injured,
who might need help, who are being rescued.
And so the city is devastated
and the infrastructure that is put in place
to be there in just such a situation, now that is failing.
So here's what I think might be an interesting way to do this.
In the way that you triage a patient, right?
Let's triage that infrastructure.
Let's triage this medical system.
In your experience now, after having gone through Katrina,
and now, boy, and I hate to even say this,
but Dr. Pink wrote about the pandemic.
When did you write about the pandemic?
A year before the pandemic?
Yeah, I worked on a documentary series.
It was called Pandemic, How to Prevent an Outbreak.
And it premiered January 20th, 2020.
And the pandemic hit February and March of 2020.
What say you with this witchcraft?
No, it's that thing is, it's exactly what you said.
We need to triage because these are maybe rare events,
but they are foreseeable.
The whole docu-series was about how scientists
all over the world were saying, we have to get ready.
These are, this is gonna happen.
It's not a question of, will it happen?
It's, when will it happen?
And so we need to do all these things to get ready for it.
That's right.
So why is it that we don't make these investments?
But we are not, we are not and have never been
a prophylactic oriented society.
We are, and for the most part,
people I think in general are reactive.
It's, you know, you can say all along,
like maybe we shouldn't live in a flood basin,
but generally you don't do anything about it
until you're floating.
And so as you look at, let's say, you know,
let's go writ large into more of the health infrastructure
of the country.
If you were going to triage the system,
would you look first to the sort of broader base,
we shouldn't be a for-profit system,
or would you look at it and say, it's about coordination?
If you were to reorganize and restructure us,
triaging that system to make it more reactive,
responsive and prophylactic to some extent,
what would you address first?
What would be the most dire need?
I mean, well, I'm just gonna riff here
because I'm no expert on healthcare economics,
but you know, well, what comes first to mind
is our healthcare staff who we forget about,
like the personnel, they've gone through such trauma,
they're having a lot of difficulties,
we have shortages of health workers
in really important areas.
So there's been rationing in some ways of care
or a lessening of the quality of care,
for example, during COVID surges.
So we really need to look at our health workforce
and support that.
So when we think about infrastructure,
it's actually people as well.
How would you do that?
Now, would you, how far behind are we
and if this pandemic doesn't ease,
or if monkeypox or whatever they've got next
coming for us doesn't ease,
how do we invest in and get these people,
A, the people that are already working there,
some type of care to preserve their sanity
and their wellbeing,
and two, bringing in the next generation of workers.
I think it's, it is mostly about supporting people
in their jobs properly, paying them well
and giving them the kinds of support
that they need to do the jobs that they have trained to do.
And it's also about all of us.
It's about Americans and there have been,
there's been such a breach of trust during this pandemic.
We talk about it with all sorts of professionals,
whether it's trust in leaders and political leaders
and journalists, but in public health officials
who are attacked and denigrated,
but also the health workforce, believe it or not,
it feels the same way when it comes to a vaccine for COVID.
You will believe something that you see on social media
over your trusted doctor.
Why is that?
That is very hard for health professionals
or when people have gotten sick from COVID
after not being vaccinated perhaps
and then wanting a whole suite of treatment sometimes
that the doctors don't believe it has efficacy,
that they don't believe it will work.
So some of that is also adding or has added
in these recent years.
Yes, you are being so polite about this right now.
I'm very impressed with how polite you are
and not just saying, well, the first thing we need to do
is get crazy people off of Facebook.
Get them off.
I saw this in the local hospital here.
When the pandemic first hit,
man, the signs went up, healthcare heroes work here
and the fire departments would come
and the changing of the shifts,
everybody would stand outside and they would do a clap
and it was about, it took about eight to 12 months
and I remember driving by one day
and it was probably around the election that ended
and it was, so we were past that
and the toxicity within the public sphere
was so high at that point.
This was post January 6th
and there was a group of protesters
in the same place of honor that they stood
standing by those now weathered signs
that still stood as healthcare heroes work here
and they were protesting the nurses and the doctors.
So imagine you've just gone through hell.
You've watched people die.
You've been helpless.
You've done everything you could to keep people alive.
You risked your own life before vaccines.
You risked your own life
and now not only are you not being hailed,
you're being attacked right outside your place of work
and I remember thinking, well, this on an emotional level
this must be infuriating and maddening and also despairing.
You're so right.
That's exactly what I saw in the hospital.
So this is a piece of it and this gets to
in any disaster, any emergency, it is all of us.
We have to respond.
We have to do our part or else there will be what we've seen
which is a horrific burden of death and suffering
that is avoidable.
We've hollowed them out.
Yeah, and I think in journalism,
maybe we didn't do enough to prepare people for the idea
that this was a new disease and that something you hear
today about it might not be the same as what you hear tomorrow
because science will advance
and also the virus will change potentially
and we've seen that but I think maybe people lost trust
because they weren't prepared for in fact
and this is always in whatever emergency
that you have to be flexible and you can't just be rigid
and have one way of doing things
or you will not be evolving.
You will not be doing your process improvement
in the midst of an emergency.
So this was true in Hurricane Katrina,
the events in this hospital.
There was this race to try to find the perfect triage method
and the answer is there isn't one.
There has to be preparedness
but then we have to prepare to be flexible
and we did see that in COVID too.
Some really ingenious types of adaptations
and creative thinking that stretched resources.
So we need to get out of that mindset of necessarily having
to ration or make these tragic decisions
but also thinking creatively
about how to expand resources in a crisis
and I've seen that over and over again
that lives can be saved because of that.
Let me ask you, so this is,
you've been very prescient about some of the things
that are coming your way.
Is there something on your horizon right now,
infrastructure rise?
I'm gonna throw mine out there, what I believe it to be.
Water.
Water will be the next great catastrophe
that we face and it'll be the antithesis of Katrina.
It will be drought and it will be devastating
and in slightly different areas
and I'm not sure we have the infrastructure
to know how to deal with that.
If you're throwing odds, where do you see the next thing?
Is it a similar pandemic?
What do you got for us?
Here's mine, I would like us to do better right now
with all of the disasters we are living through.
One thing that we haven't talked about
and I know this means a lot to you too
but the sort of the inequity and outcomes
and the people who suffer the most
in these types of situations
and there are real disparities in the groups
and we talk about socioeconomic and racial
but there's another one which is disability too
and I was speaking with an expert on this
and just the other day
and she mentioned that in her counting
that like more than half of the people
who died of COVID in the US
could be classified as people with disabilities
and that again gets to this triage
and who we value and where we put in the investments
to harden infrastructure,
to make sure that there are adequate staffing ratios
to support health providers
and even I worked on an article during COVID
just looking at New York City
and the very different outcomes in that first horrific surge
that all of us who lived in New York remember in 2020
and the outcomes were very different by hospital.
Oh yeah, I had friends at Elmhurst.
I mean, they had refrigerator trucks backed up.
They were just, they were stacking bodies.
They were overwhelmed
and that's a traditionally lower resource facility.
Yes, Elmhurst is famous.
There's a video that went viral
that drew the attention to that hospital.
I spent a lot of time in the Brooklyn Hospital Center
which is one of the freestanding hospitals,
one of the few that's not part of a big system
and all of the hospitals unfortunately
had those horrific trucks outside with the bodies.
Not only that, do you remember
they had to actually build a second level
because they filled up those trailers.
They got the Carpenter,
the hospital Carpenter had to come out
and build a second level.
I have a friend who worked in the hospital who said,
and he's a veteran, he's been to war.
He said he's never seen anything like it
and that it will haunt him till his dying day,
that it was as horrific as anything
that he had ever experienced and worse.
So how do we do better?
We come together as a society,
we listen to the advice,
we care about the other people in our community.
If everybody just thought about what can I do
to make my own family, my own community more prepared?
What can I do to look out for
or include in the preparation process
the people who are most vulnerable,
the people with disabilities
who already have a lot of knowledge
about how to sort of adapt to situations.
It could seem overwhelming, I know that,
but I also know from having written about these stories
from five days at Memorial to COVID
that the individual efforts can make a difference,
a real difference and it does take all of us.
It's not just-
It's really interesting how you frame it
because it is, you're absolutely right.
It's overwhelming and yet alarmingly simple.
And it almost seems as though
the real key to it is reminding people
and convincing people
that if you shore up the ground around us,
if you shore up the ground around those
who are standing on the most tenuous soil,
it will strengthen everything.
And it's reminding people that that investment
in those that are most vulnerable,
it's not charity, it's smart investment
because it shores up the entire system.
You know, there's that old saying
that rising tide lifts all boats,
but not if you don't have a boat
and not if you don't have docks and infrastructure.
Like you've got to invest in putting everybody
on more stable ground
and that will make the ground you're standing on
less tenuous.
So if we all come together to improve things
for the most vulnerable, it is in our self-interest.
I think you can make a very good argument for that.
Right, the self-interest of that.
Let's get the algorithm to drive people to that.
Well, that's, I appreciate you so much, Dr. Fink.
I follow your writing
because I wanna know what I have to be scared of next.
What's the next thing that we can look out for?
I think the one thing I committed to early
in this pandemic was to never predict anything.
And that turned out to be a very good thing.
Yes, Dr. Sherry Fink, Five Days at Memorial.
It's a mini-series on Apple television.
Plus, and thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you so much, John.
All right, we are back after having been sobered up
by Dr. Sherry Fink.
We are not prepared.
Dr. Sherry Fink gave such simple advice.
It was really one of those things like other pandemic
and Katrina and all that.
What could we do?
And she's like, we could be better people.
Right.
And you're like, hmm.
Interesting concept.
What do you got that might work for us?
Now, are you guys relatively sanguine
about all this shit?
Or are you, what's your emotional state
about the variety of disasters
which seem to be hurtling our way?
That's such a good question.
Thank you.
I don't really know how I should be feeling.
And in fact, I'd love to get your guys' thoughts
on some things that are kind of swirling
around the news lately.
Robbie, how are you feeling?
It's tough to be optimistic, but there are,
yeah, there's definitely some news stories
that are weighing me down.
Yes, yes.
Can't decide whether or not to be stressed out.
Something on my mind lately
has been these crazy lantern flies.
John, did you know that in New Jersey,
they have a pub crawl that is dedicated
to squishing lantern flies?
Is that new?
I don't know if it's, I just read about it this week.
Here's, here's what I'm going to tell you happened, Maria.
There's a pub crawl.
While they were going, somebody said,
let's fucking kill this bug.
But nobody got together and did that specifically.
It's just that we drink a lot.
And we wander because all of us
have lost our licenses because of the drinking.
Let me ask you this.
What does the lantern fly do that makes it
such a public menace?
Because we've been getting bulletins down here.
If you see one, not only do you have to kill it,
you have to call the authorities.
I have had to notify the police, you know.
The bug police, the bug cops.
The right people to call,
I think the agriculture department in New Jersey
about lantern flies.
So do you, Maria, do you know what they do?
Is it, what's the situation?
Yes, they will, they harm pretty much all trees and plants
that they come in contact with, mainly fruit bearing trees
and vineyards.
So if you like wine, gotta have a heads up about these flies.
But pretty much just destroying vegetation,
which obviously has multiple consequences.
And there is a real 800 number in Pennsylvania,
that's 1-800-BAD-FLY.
When you call it, get ready for this, get ready for this.
When you call it, what do they do?
Send a SWAT team?
Oh.
I'm gonna go.
I knew I was gonna get fired at the end of this podcast.
That's not.
I'm sorry.
I'm my apologies.
That's my deepest apologies.
That's gotta be stuck.
So honestly, I think you've got it.
I think you're gonna go the way the lantern flies.
Right now in New Jersey, there is a pub crawl
looking for Robbie to kick my ass.
Yeah, that's right.
Don't go to Jersey anymore.
Hey, are you the mother fucker that did the SWAT show?
Hey, hey, get over here, you piece of shit.
Yeah, this after a set of the stress factory,
I go straight to my car.
By the way, there's no way that like,
individuals in New Jersey are going to crush enough
lantern flies to make a difference.
You don't think so?
You know, I just don't have faith in our ability
to somehow eradicate some bug
that can reproduce, you know, by the million.
Yeah, there's no fuck.
Basically by next year,
we'll be living in the lantern fly state.
All right.
Well, this has been lovely.
This is our mid August podcast.
Mid?
Mid to late?
Mid to late, yeah.
We've got some podcasts coming up
that'll blow your mind,
some of the fucking people that are coming on this thing
for no apparent reason.
It's going to be wild.
I don't want to say who's coming.
But people are coming.
Yeah.
It's classified.
By the way, the list of guests on this podcast
are being held right now
in one of those closet safes at Mar-a-Lago.
Robbie, do you know John's birthday?
No, should I know John's birthday?
Just for the code.
For the code on the thing.
Well, if you guys need me, you know where I'll be,
dancing under the stars, listening to saxophone
and eating a meat item.
Yes.
All right, kids.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Robbie Sloak, Maria Randazo,
and of course, Dr. Sherry Fink,
Five Days at Memorial is a mini series
available to stream on Apple TV Plus
and our show will be returning to Apple TV Plus.
October 7th.
So hopefully that's not going to be a Wednesday.
It's a Friday.
Oh, thank God, because I would hate
to miss saxophone and C-flicks.
Yeah, luckily it doesn't conflict.
Doesn't conflict.
And season one obviously is online right now.
Anyway, thank you so much, guys.
Thank you.
As always.
Thank you, John.
A lot of fun talking to you.
And we'll see you guys later.
The problem with John Stewart podcast is an Apple TV Plus
podcast and a joint busboy production.