China - Friend, Enemy, or Frenemy: The Tim Milosch Interview
In this episode of The Babylon Bee podcast, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle talk to professor Tim Milosch about China and international politics. Tim Milosch is an adjunct professor of communication studies, teaching world politics at Biola University, and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in political science studies at Claremont Graduate University. Did the virus start from someone eating some bad bat soup? Is the Great Wall really that great? Are the Chinese a bunch of filthy commies? Who is General Tso? Find out by watching this new episode! You can hear more from Tim on his podcast Tim Talks Politics. Topics Discussed Which jokes are not racist? Who is General Tso? The origins of the coronavirus Who are the Chinese Communist Party? China's handling of its neighbors in the South Sea and refusal to recognize independence for Taiwan or Hong Kong China making fake islands Chinese propaganda China cracking down on churches, demolishing buildings, arresting Christians Subscriber Portion Kyle and Ethan subject Tim Milosch to the ten questions and we find out if there is a Roman Catholic Carman!
It's like having this extended family of people who love you.
Yeah, we get emails.
We get some pretty good emails sometimes.
We got a touching one yesterday.
We did?
Yeah.
Why don't you share it?
I did.
I tagged you in it and you never reply because you never go on your email app.
We need a real email app.
Ethan is the embodiment of old man yells at cloud.
You're like that about other stuff.
I'm trying to go what?
That's true.
So we wanted to let you guys know that we're changing things up a little bit.
So, you know, we have been since the beginning of the podcast releasing, I think, on Wednesdays.
No, we changed it.
We did like Fridays, Mondays, Wednesdays.
We used to just do once a week and then we split it.
We were doing Wednesday and Friday.
We just went to video and we run into this problem that we record the news show on Monday and poor Dan or Tuesday.
I mean, I recorded on Tuesday, Monday's prep.
Poor Dan has that less than 24 hours to edit the whole thing and get it done and out for our Wednesday deadline.
Which it was very fast on audio.
Yeah, audio.
Yeah.
Audio, it's dual part.
It's very tight.
Because I was the guy doing it before Dan came along.
And then video is a whole other animal.
Plus, we're doing graphics and stuff.
It just takes a ton more prep doing video.
So the plan is to release our interviews on Wednesdays.
Right.
Because interviews we have, you know, you can record it ahead of time.
They're not as time sensitive.
We have a bunch stacked up, so we're able to prepare them the week before, throw them out on Wednesday.
It also feels like when we do the news show on Wednesday, we're talking about news from the week before that everybody's already talked about.
So I feel like now doing it on Friday, we'll be doing our prep and stuff the same week, and it might be a little bit more up to date.
So that'll be nice.
And you'll have the weekend to listen to the news show.
Did we seriously?
And they're a little more spread out.
So Tuesday is going to be the interview show.
Did I say Wednesday?
I can't remember.
I think I did.
I already messed this up.
Tuesday will be.
The new schedule will be Tuesday, the news show.
Or not the news show.
No?
This is going back.
Tuesday, the interview show.
We should have Dan tell everybody.
He hasn't memorized.
And then Friday, the news show.
So this week, this is not the news show.
This is the interview show.
Again, so soon you say yes.
Because we wanted to give you something today, but we're doing the news show this Friday.
So in the meantime, you're going to get to hear us talk about China.
We had this picture in our head that you would download your Babylon B podcast and you would go, yay, the news show.
What?
Yeah, what?
And this massive crowd of people would charge in with pictures.
I have a paranoia of, you know, establishing that we will always be here at this certain time and then one day we're just not without explanation.
Yeah.
So this is our compromise on that.
So usually Tuesdays and then Fridays.
Now it will be Wednesday for just this week.
Right.
Right?
No, it's not usually Tuesdays and Fridays.
It's usually Wednesdays and Fridays.
I thought you said it was.
It's going to be usually.
Oh.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's going to be usually.
It's weird to say future tents.
Like, usually, usually the thing that's happening, it will be.
It will be going forward.
You will get your interview shows on Tuesday and your new shows on Friday.
Right this week, you will get it Wednesday and Friday.
Without further ado, this is Tim Malash of that big university down there.
Biola, that sounds like a disease.
Biola.
I came down with the biola.
Doc, I got the biola.
I'm walking real bad.
I got West Nile biola.
I can't sit down.
I got the biola.
Enjoy.
Hey, Kyle and Ethan.
Hold that thought.
We've got something to say.
That's right.
Our podcast this week is being sponsored by Faithful Counseling.
Sometimes things can get a little overwhelming.
Even though you know God's there for you, you need to talk to somebody.
It's nice to have somebody to talk to in a private environment.
They'll talk to you about depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, family conflicts, even crisis of faith issues.
They do this entirely online.
You can talk to people via text, video chat, phone call.
And you know that this person shares your Christian worldview, and that's a big concern for people that go and get counseling.
Yeah, you don't want heretics teaching you or counseling you.
You don't want those darn atheists counseling you.
So you can go to faithfulcounseling.com/slash Babylon B to get your 10% discount.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
So, you know, you could having a crisis of faith, even or you're having depression, anxiety, stress, all of that stuff.
Someone to talk to.
Someone to talk to.
You can go to faithfulcounseling.com/slash Babylon B. FaithfulCounseling.com/slash Babylon B. What was that URL?
No, I'm just kidding.
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They got it.
Back to you, Kyle and Ethan.
Yes, everybody.
And welcome to the Babylon B interview show.
And I'm Kyle Mann, and this is Ethan Nicole.
Ethan Nicole, hello.
Joining us is Steve Rogers.
Steve Rogers, the Captain America.
Good.
You got the reference.
I can't believe I got that.
I was almost thinking, Mr. Rogers.
My brain went through all the Rogers I could think of.
Fred Rogers.
That's true.
Isn't Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers?
Yes.
Okay.
But this is not Steve Rogers.
This is an imposter.
Jeez, can they see that shirt he has on in the camera?
I don't know if they can.
I would think so.
It's abstract.
Anyway, he's wearing a Captain America shirt for anybody listening or if the shirt got cut off.
Today he's Captain China.
That's well, he's Captain America going against China.
That's right, fighting the Chinese, fighting the Chinese.
Fighting just the government, not the people.
Right?
We always gotta say that whenever you say anything.
Let's not speak for him.
Should we introduce a distinction?
Do you hate China, the government, or China, the race?
Hey, we still haven't introduced him.
Well, introduce him.
We thought about doing a drinking game for the Babylon B where you take a shot every time we forget to introduce the guest.
You don't encourage drinking.
But shoot a shot of root beer.
I mean, obviously.
This is Tim Malash, who is a teacher at Biola.
That's two words: Tim, then Milash.
Tim Elosh.
It's not Tim Elash.
It would be a cool, like, one name, like if he was a musician or something.
Or like Tim Malash.
Like a savage warrior.
I am Tim Elosh.
Tim Malash has taken many heads for our people.
After you just put them together for like a website or a Twitter handle, that's what it would sound like, right?
Tim Elosh.
Tim Alash.
Or like a really organic substance you can put in your tea, makes it healthier.
Yeah.
Sorry, continue.
I'm sorry.
Tim knows stuff about China.
That's the main thing I'm going on, right?
In foreign policy.
He was quick to tell us he's not a China expert, though.
Yeah.
Because the China expert would know how to use chopsticks really well.
They would have eaten a few batwings.
You have to know how to get out of the finger trap.
Yeah, they could play Chinese checkers like expert level.
That's right.
Or go.
Or go.
Do you know what go is next level?
The next level.
Did you watch Knives Out?
Oh, yeah.
It was a game with the black and white stones they were playing.
Oh, that's the play that in A Beautiful Mind 2.
Do they seem?
That sounds right.
I don't know.
Yeah, I think so.
I don't remember.
Yeah.
It was a while ago.
It was pretty crazy.
I've tried it and I don't understand it at all.
I even play on the small board, like the 9x9.
Don't get it.
Yeah, me neither.
Tried.
It's nuts.
Yeah.
So we brought Tim Malash on because he is not a China expert, but he's adjacent.
China expert expert.
He's an emerging.
He told us he's an emerging foreign policy expert.
A scholar on international relations.
That's right.
All right.
So China's been in the news a lot, you know, and we thought it would be a good idea to discuss something.
I think the main thing we want to understand is like there's racist jokes that you can't make, and then there's right on the line.
So you need to just help us figure out what's like right on the line so we're safe, but we can still make the jokes because we don't want to be mean to anybody.
That's right.
Yeah.
We're bringing you on as a consultant.
Yeah, you're a consultant.
So now I'm a comedy consultant.
That makes me like an emerging comedy consultant.
I just imagine Ace Ventura coming out of that rhino when you say emerging.
I didn't watch that movie.
I wasn't allowed.
Neither was I. We'll do an overlay right here.
Well, why don't you talk to us about China?
Or tell us about yourself.
You're from Biola, but you're doing your studies at Claremont Graduate University.
Yeah, so I study international relations and political philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, and that's where I'm working on getting a doctorate.
So that's where I won't go as far as to say like I'm an expert because it's the same reason I don't tell my, I tell my students, don't call me Dr. Malash, because I haven't reached that official, here's your piece of paper level.
So now you're certified, right?
And I mean, I guess we live in a society where experts are a little, there might be a mixed feeling about whether or not someone's an expert and whether that makes it trustworthy.
So I'm still trying to figure out to what degree do I embrace that label.
But yeah, so I study international relations and political philosophy there.
And then part-time as an adjunct faculty in political science at Biola, I teach classes in world politics, foreign policy and diplomacy, contemporary political thought, all that good stuff.
So it's super fun.
And I, for a time, coached the debate team there, but unfortunately we don't have a debate team anymore, which is a fun.
People are getting their feelings hurt too much.
Maybe.
I don't know.
We had the reputation of being the nice people on the debate.
We certainly were the Christian school.
We only watch Fox News and stuff, so we only imagine colleges are just snowflakes melting everywhere.
Happily not Biola.
Biola.
Biola's a great place.
I love that school.
I went there, and it's a privilege to teach there.
So fantastic students.
My sister went to Biola.
Oh, very cool.
So I got friends that went friends.
Yeah.
So, okay, let's get into the meat of this discussion here.
Yeah.
What are people getting wrong?
Do you feel like when people are generally talking about China and this whole plague that has come upon us?
This pox, if you will.
The pox.
Right.
The bat pox.
Did we ever really think we'd use that word in general conversation?
Start.
I mean, saying someone, saying a pox upon you might possibly be.
Even just how legit is the idea that the.
I've heard all these different things, but is it pretty confirmed that the virus came from China?
And yeah, we're pretty certain about that.
Yeah, that's a great place to start.
What do we know?
What don't we know?
And yeah, we do know the virus originated in China.
And was it with somebody eating a bat sandwich?
No.
It's on the floor.
No, we're pretty certain it's not that.
Okay.
Now.
Did it have anything to do with bats at all?
Some people.
It's fun, I think.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, the bat is kind of the stand-in for wet markets at China.
Okay.
These open-air markets.
Like the mascot.
Yeah, where people go to get exotic meats.
Although, apparently they get far more exotic meats in a wet market than just a black network.
And it's called wet because they have water balloon fights.
If only.
If only.
No, it's pretty much that's where they just you pick the animal and they butcher it.
So it's like the blood is the wetness.
That's what I've heard is the wetness because they slaughter them right there.
So the streets are like just running with blood.
It makes sense.
But you know, the funny thing is, as much as people have talked about wet markets, I haven't actually seen anyone write a story in American media.
And maybe it just might be the sources I look at, although I look at a lot of different sources.
But no one's, I've seen probably one story that actually has described a wet market.
And it wasn't even very detailed.
It was just making a point of, oh, hey, the wet markets are back open.
So it's really interesting that for all the talk about wet markets, there hasn't been a lot of like, hey, this is what it is.
This is what it isn't.
So I can't say that.
But yeah, so there's two parallel stories on the virus.
It escaped from a lab in Wuhan, or it emerged out of these wet markets and the wild.
To a certain level, it doesn't really matter where it came from there so long as the point of origin is confirmed.
It's Wuhan, China.
That's where it happened.
That's where it broke out.
And then it just made its way around the world as a result.
I mean, that's more or less where we can pretty comfortably say that's our starting point for this whole thing.
Okay.
I saw the New York governor was calling it the European virus yesterday.
Yeah.
I was really wondering where that came from.
This press conference keeps saying, yeah, this European virus attack.
Is it racist to call a virus Asian or Chinese?
How do you feel about that from a foreign policy point of view?
It's inaccurate.
It's inaccurate.
It's unhelpful.
Good labeling, I guess, if you're a president who really understands labeling.
Yeah, if you really want to get people angry and everything.
And so I guess to that degree, yeah, it could fall under the heading of racist.
But at the same time, it's just inaccurate.
And I think when we're talking about things like this and when you're talking about foreign policy, you want accuracy.
You want to be clear on what you're talking about.
And especially when you're talking about foreign policy to the American people, you want to be clear on what you mean and what that entails.
And so clarity is really important in how you talk about interactions with other countries.
It just feels like a new way to be racist.
I'd never heard of the idea that calling a disease a certain, like where it came from.
Like so many diseases are named for where they came from.
I mean, name one, and almost all of them are.
Yeah.
And then suddenly with this one, because it feels like it's the times we're in.
The moment that you say anything, they find a way to get upset about it.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
It seems silly.
If it was somewhere in America and they call it the this and that virus, nobody would be saying it's racist.
It just seems and that's why it's an issue with accuracy at that point, right?
Because the moment you say, call it the race.
So calling it the Wuhan virus is okay?
Because we know what they call it.
Maybe, but what does that really corona?
I'm not saying I'm not saying what does it do.
I just said we've always done it.
We've never asked this question of is it racist to call a virus this until this virus, right?
Yeah.
Until this moment.
Now we're getting touchy about that.
Yeah.
And has it been racist all along?
Like we've been talking way back West Nile.
Why are we so racist against West Nile and Spanish flu?
Are you so racist against those guys?
Which I don't even know if there is like, is there like a West Nile River?
I don't even know.
I haven't even known.
Did it just come from the West Bank of the Nile?
That's fascinating.
There's a lot of them that I didn't even realize where that was, what the place was that it was referring to.
Yeah, because I mean, I know there's a Blue Nile and a White Nile and a Nile, but I've never heard of a West Nile.
There's a Blue Nile.
Yeah, it runs through Ethiopia and Sudan and into Egypt.
Ethan's pretty passionate about this because he walks around the office all day saying, China virus!
China virus!
If any time somebody says virus, I go, China!
It is easier to pronounce than COVID-19 or coronavirus or something like that if you really want to get into like the whole long.
I want to call it the bat sandwich virus or something like that.
It's more fun.
Yeah, it is more fun.
I'll grant you that to make up names and labels for it.
Foreign policy can sound boring at that point.
It's like, ah, coronavirus, COVID-19.
What is that?
Yeah.
But I think going back to the point about racism and what they call it, I think that is a good point to bring up on going back to the idea of accuracy and being accurate in what we label things because the moment you label it something like China virus or Chinese virus or China flu or whatever, that immediately moves the conversation away from understanding the thing and its effects to, okay, are you racist or not?
Which, I mean, that is so far off the off the realm or off the radar of what needs to be talked about at that point that it becomes a major distraction.
And that gets in the way of good decision making.
It probably leads to more confusion.
Hence, you know, the governor of New York calling it a European flu now, which was he accused of racism at that point?
I don't know.
So we've confirmed it comes from China.
I'm not obsessed with calling it that.
It's just that my only point is that these days, like even what you just said, it distracts us into the debates about racism.
It never would have until this virus, never.
Sure.
So it's weird that we have to call it the virus.
Which came from Toronto.
Right, right, right.
In order to have any conversation about what we would do about this in the future, right?
If it came from this one specific place, then we have to have talks about foreign policy, I assume, would be what do we do in the future about this kind of stuff, right?
But you can use, so at that point, you have to admit that it came from China, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
It does not obscure the location of the point of origin.
It's like, it can be.
We're going to change the name to that one virus.
And then whenever we talk about it.
That one virus that did that thing that the CCP.
I don't hate China.
I love General Seuss Chicken.
At the beginning.
I used chopsticks.
At the beginning, they were calling it, what do they call it?
They kept calling it the Wuhan coronavirus, I think.
Which I think is probably fairly precise.
Yeah, that's not confusing.
I think I think it's Wuhan.
But then it kind of got politicized to this China virus.
European virus.
It was an order.
A lot of it, I do think a lot of it is the Trump thing, right?
He kept saying China.
Because I guess there was for a period, I don't know clear what it was.
They were trying to say the American military made it happen or something.
Yeah, that was actually a really fight for the military.
Yeah, so this was actually something where we can get back into Chinese politics is as the pandemic unfolded and people started questioning the Chinese government's handling of it as they started pushing back and demanding answers and saying, hey, how come you weren't on this sooner?
All that stuff.
Apparently the premier of China, Xi Jinping, kind of, I guess, gave his diplomats a pep talk and basically told them, hey, you need to get tougher out there.
And so that's where all of a sudden we started seeing these stories about somehow coronavirus was a bioweapon from the U.S. Army that got implanted into China.
That came from Chinese diplomats who then flat out lie?
Yeah.
It was.
It was just a flat out lie that our media ran with.
Yeah, it was totally a conspiracy theory that our media ran with.
So I'm not sure if that CNN reporter is so quick to call out your satire.
I'm not sure if he's been on that story.
Yeah, I'm not sure if he's been on that story or not.
And by the way, whenever you refer to President Xi, we prefer if you say, may he live forever.
Is it Xi?
I say she.
I don't know.
How do you pronounce it?
It's she.
Xi.
Xi.
Yeah.
Although, don't ask me to pronounce it super accurately.
So fun story here.
Like, I was teaching a lesson on Chinese history back when I was a junior high school teacher.
And I had a Chinese student in this class, and I was pronouncing some names of different dynasties in Chinese history.
And she started laughing.
I said, all right, I know I'm pronouncing it wrong.
And I said, please help me.
And so she gave me the proper pronunciation.
And I tried.
And she laughed and said, that's a little better.
And we went back and forth five minutes.
It took me five minutes.
It was like a one-syllable phrase.
And she said, okay, you're getting there.
And we moved on.
So, yeah, so I'm just repeating what I hear the rest of American media say.
So we all know how accurate they are.
We realized when we started a podcast, we had to learn how to pronounce words.
Yeah, words that you only read.
Because I read things that I don't, you know, I'm kind of introverted.
I read things and I don't really talk about them or watch videos or anything.
Right.
You know, it's probably the same thing.
When you start teaching classes, you have to start learning how to say words.
We're not big talkers, too.
That's a weird thing.
Well, the moment we come behind the mic, we become very talkative.
Hey, everybody.
We are up to the Babylon B podcast.
That's right.
Yeah.
Like when we hang out, it's like long moments of silence and then like you know what would be cool?
But that doesn't make for a very good podcast.
That's true.
No.
So it does not.
Here we are.
Yeah.
Pronounce with confidence.
That's the lesson.
All right.
So what kind of things is this pandemic exposing between China and U.S. in terms of relations?
Yeah, so it's exposing a lot of fault lines that were already there.
So I talked a little bit about this on my podcast a couple weeks ago: a lot of the fault lines between China and America were already pretty well documented.
You know, we just came out of that trade war at the end of 2019, just in time.
And we came out of that trade war.
So that was a, you know, economic tension has been building.
Taiwan is a long-standing point of friction in our relationship with them.
They've been the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, the military of China, has been working on building man-made islands and fortifying them in the South China Sea in an effort to build kind of like a security cordon or buffer zone around the Chinese coastline.
And so there's, and this has been something that has been hotly contested between America and China, but also other countries in the world.
And then, not to mention China's human rights record, that it's been pretty well documented, that they've been really harshly persecuting the Uyghur Muslim population in Western China.
Although, you know, as Christians, we're very familiar with the persecution of Christians in China over the last several decades and so.
The human rights record also is another piece of friction between the two countries.
And so these are all pre-existing or yeah, pre-COVID.
And then COVID comes along.
And now you have this situation where China kind of stonewalls talking about it with the rest of the world.
They prevent in the early stages, they prevent world health experts from getting on the ground to evaluate what's going on there.
And then we could say the rest is history that becomes a worldwide pandemic and it's made us all like basically grind to a halt.
And so it just took what was already strained relations and just made them more strained, more difficult, more fraught.
And so that's kind of where it stands right now.
So if anything, I'd say it's acted as kind of like an acceleration to building tension between China and the United States.
So where does that lead?
Like nobody can go to China or come from China, just like block them off?
No, actually.
That's impossible.
Yeah, no, that's, yeah, exactly.
And this is what makes sense.
Except for maybe they have to be in hazmat suits.
Right.
No, I'm not sure I've heard anything about that yet, but expensive.
Yeah, they are expensive.
I don't even know if we have a stockpile of that, right?
You're having a hard time.
I ran the numbers when they were going to do the big bailout money, the stimulus, you know, the trillions or whatever.
If we got everybody like a nice $600, $700 hazmat suit in the whole U.S., then that would have saved us like, it would have been like a quarter. of what they were spending or an eighth.
I think it was like an eighth.
Was that the inspiration behind the hamster ball story?
That was later.
Okay.
That seems to be like a natural progression.
That might even be hazmats.
Welcome to the new normal.
I'm impressed that you did the numbers.
I actually ran the numbers.
That's pretty impressive.
I tweeted it.
You missed my tweet.
I muted you on Twitter.
It was a while ago.
I muted you a long time ago.
I was just playing off Frank because Frank said something about hazmat suits.
Anyway.
Yeah, well, I don't know if there's a cool story, bro.
Cool story.
Yeah, I don't know if there's going to be any major travel restrictions.
I mean, obviously there have been now.
And I don't know when those will be lifted, but because we have a lot of students who come here for school.
We have a lot of obviously businesses that go back to a ton of business relations.
Even after the trade war, there's going to be a lot of business relations.
My book was printed there.
There you go.
See, you're part of the problem, Ethan.
I know.
Yeah, it feels like something where we were all kind of, we knew they're commies, a bunch of filthy commies, you know, and then we, I'm being kind of funny, but you were talking to an expert here.
Are they filthy commies?
No.
Well, you know, short answer.
It feels like we knew that they were some kind of geopolitical threat in a lot of ways.
And then, but we were all kind of like, well, we get cheap stuff there.
So we overlook a lot of the things like the human rights abuses and all of that.
And then, you know, now that this is kind of exposed, like, well, we have some major insecurities and flaws in our supply chain and all of that stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's something to consider.
And this is something that a lot of foreign policy experts and, you know, the China experts have talked about is when we're trying to characterize the relationship between America and China, should we characterize it as enemies?
Well, no, not exactly because of the business relations and the trade and not and even just the cultural exchange.
I mean, we have cultural exchanges going back decades, even before communism.
So you can't really call them enemies.
So people have settled on calling us competitors, maybe pure competitors is a phrase that you might hear.
People are really hesitant to call us adversaries, although that might be one of the effects of accelerating the tensions as a result of this.
But people have somehow sometimes jokingly referred to China and America as frenemies now.
And that might be more accurate.
Excuse me.
More accurate.
That's an official geopolitical expert term.
Frenemies.
So the way to think about it is, yeah, on the one hand, we are competing with them.
We're not adversaries.
We're not trying to pit our whole societies against one another.
But at the same time, we're still navigating these very complex, very fraught elements of our relationship.
And that's one of the things that makes it very different from, say, the Cold War.
With the Cold War, we had almost no trade with the Soviet Union.
And that's been one of the most probably difficult things, I think, for the general American population and even some experts really to wrestle with here.
Is on the one hand, I just saw a story today, actually, of, I think it was on the American Conservative, a commentary was saying, hey, are we in Cold War II?
Well, the moment you call it Cold War II, people are thinking, oh, how is this like our Cold War with the Soviet Union?
But there's some significant differences.
And one of the biggest differences is we are far more enmeshed and intertwined as countries and economies than we ever were with the Soviet Union.
And so that just makes it a much more complex relationship and much more complex landscape to navigate.
What kind of cultural things have we gotten from China?
Like you say, cultural trade.
We give them Avengers movies.
Panda Express.
They give us what?
Matt Damon, The Great Wall.
That movie?
That movie.
I didn't see it.
I didn't watch it.
All these newbies, all the King Kong and Godzilla movies are from China, right?
No.
No.
That's from Japan.
Japan.
Oh, Japan.
Yeah.
See, Japan gave us.
There are two different countries.
Yeah, Japan does America.
And they feel very strongly about that difference.
Somebody.
Korea gives us K-pop bounds.
What does China give us?
They got, I guess, Jackie Chan.
He came from Hong Kong, I think.
There was a company that bought the rights to Bear Mageddon, my comic in China.
So I like it for that.
So there's going to be a movie, a Bear Mageddon movie in China?
No, what they did, apparently they just spend money like crazy or something, but they do have that reputation.
They made this offer.
This isn't amazing money.
It was like small budget, you know.
But it was more money than it was basically free money to buy the rights, and they were going to make it in payments.
They made it all the payments except for the final payment, and then the company just disappeared and closed down.
And so I never got the final payment, but I got all that money for free and I still own the rights.
So it was free money at a year that I really needed it.
It was after Veggie Tales is in this like no man's land between and Babylon being Veggie Tales.
Bear Mageddon saved me in China.
So Ethan's getting all this dark money from China.
Yeah, money funded by China.
One year.
CCP plant.
What's your favorite?
I would have loved to see that, though.
What's your favorite Chinese food?
Kung Pao chicken.
Is that from China or is that American?
I have no idea.
It's probably Americanized.
I assume that whenever there's any kind of ethnic cuisine in America, it is Americanized.
If someone says, oh, Italian restaurant, I just immediately assume you mean American Italian.
If it's Chinese, I'd say, oh, you mean American Chinese?
That's true.
I just assume that.
Tainted.
That's right.
I'm a Kung Pao chicken man.
I like the sriracha on it.
Who is General So?
No idea.
I guess that's right.
You're a foreign policy expert, not a China.
If you were a China expert, you would know all about General So he made chicken.
That's all I know.
He's probably the Colonel Sanders of China.
There you go.
It's pronounced Tiso.
So I'm Googling it.
The dish is named after So.
Oh, he's saying I could just Google it?
Sung Tang.
He was a Chinese statesman and military leader in the 1800s.
Oh, so and he invented chicken.
Well, not all chicken.
He invented chicken.
He invented one particular flavor of chicken.
Okay, so what are some giant lies China government has told?
And what are some giant lies they've been accused of they didn't actually tell?
That's a great question.
So I'd say probably the next question.
How often you ask a great question?
It's pretty rare.
No, I like that one.
We always compete to get that response from her.
Yeah, we should have Italian market there.
Goes to ask three great questions.
So yeah, I think one of the big ones is obviously the conspiracy theory about this fire speed U.S. military bioweapon.
I mean, that was a big deal.
Oh, because that's a big lie they told.
Yeah, yeah, that was a whopper.
Legitimately told.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And another one is probably they really went to zero cases really, really quick.
Oh, their numbers were crazy.
Yeah, they went up and they around like 85,000 cases.
And they revised them later, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Almost doubled or something.
Yeah, around 85,000 cases, they just immediately said there's no more nuclear and no one believed that.
Reopened the wet market.
Yeah, outside of the Chinese Communist Party, I don't think anyone believed that.
I don't even know how many people within the Chinese Communist Party believe that.
But yeah, I mean, pretty quickly, most wet intelligence agencies, United States, Europe, others are just like, what?
And more recently, I think just in the last week, they started reporting new cases again in Wuhan and in other areas surrounding.
So yeah, no one really believed that.
So that's a pretty significant one.
And then the other half of that was, what did they do?
There were some big lies we think they told, but they didn't actually tell them, if there's any.
A lot of people are screaming about China, but it's like how much other stuff going on around.
Yeah.
Gosh, that's a good one.
I'm not sure I can think of anything.
What about the killing the whistleblower?
Do they really kill a whistleblower?
They have a lot of whistleblowers have disappeared.
We don't know exactly.
We don't know if they kill them.
They could be.
So I think generally that might be one of them.
Is last week, I guess there was a Chinese researcher out back east.
I'm not sure whether it was Pennsylvania or New York somewhere working on COVID-related research and ended up dead in an apparent homicide.
And yeah, pretty quickly, people spun it up and still like, oh, it was some strike on by China.
It's like, no, probably not.
Sometimes the most mundane things can be true.
And in this case, it seemed like it was kind of like a, I don't know whether it was some like love triangle or something like that that some associate love triangle.
I guess so.
It's like divided loyalty is America or China.
Who do you love more?
Damn.
No, I'm just kidding.
I have no idea.
So that seemed to be a place where people could pretty quickly run to, oh, it must be China.
I mean, I think it was just a couple of weeks ago, Gallup released a poll that indicated that something like 66 to 70% of Americans now view China unfavorably.
And that's a really steep drop.
That's pretty good numbers.
Yeah, you could call that almost a supermajority.
That's a pretty consensus bipartisan view at this point.
China is not to be trusted.
And so people are still like, yeah, China's great.
If they're being really quiet right now, I don't know who they are, but they're being quiet.
Chinese Americans, probably?
I don't know.
CNN.
Actually, is that do you think Chinese Americans are?
No, a lot of Chinese Americans are usually expatriates.
Their families came here.
They're in communism.
And so they're usually quite critical.
So it just, it depends.
I thought Donald Trump tweeted something similar to what you just said.
And then I saw Ken Jong, the comedian said wrong.
Like he likes China.
Okay, maybe he does.
I think he might have been saying it just to say speak for me, Donald Trump.
That could be.
Probably.
Yeah.
Yeah, you want to be careful of paying with too broad a brush.
Yeah, saying that you can celebrate what people think.
Yeah, and the reason I bring up the Gallup poll is just, I think it does lead to this tendency right now, in particular in the information environment in the United States, that people are very likely to mistrust China the moment something suspicious goes down related to the virus.
It's going to be one of two things, right, it's going to be China, or I guess now it's going to be Bill Gates, so it's going to be one of the two right, that seems to be where the conspiracies are going to start coming from now, and so we have to be, and you have To be, mindful and careful of that.
So that's why I like the questions.
Let's let's on the things where it's not clear that China's not involved in.
Let's like pump the brakes a little bit before we go all in and say, hey, it's China's fault.
What can actually be done?
I mean, like to not have something like this happen again.
Because it seems like a lot of these viruses come from China, right?
Or at least there's been a number of them, right?
There have been several viruses in the past, like swine flu, bird flu, they've originated in Asia.
That's true.
And so, yeah, I'm not a virologist, so I'm not going to say, like, this is how we end it.
So it's just perpetual lockdown.
That's how.
But is there things that have been talked about?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of times it's when people talk about pandemic, it's going to be a lot of, you know, let's make sure we understand the disease.
Let's make sure we, you know, get on it early and take proper precautions.
But to a certain degree, this is something that a lot of people, and it doesn't really help the case for being connected in an interconnected world.
But a lot of people have just commented on the fact that this is a feature, not a bug, of globalism and interconnected economies and countries, more people traveling than ever before.
One of the reasons these viruses and bugs can move so quickly across international borders is because we're an interconnected, globalized world.
And so to a certain degree, those kinds of things happen.
Yeah, and that's just it.
Do you put that genie back into the bottle?
And most people would say, no, you don't.
But on the other hand, you do now have this very real situation where you now have to work on managing pandemics and trying to stop them early and trying to understand them quickly.
And that's something that this particular episode has been a really big challenge for not just the United States, but for other countries around the world is that their pandemic responses, their governments have largely anticipated something like this happening.
But I think the scale and the speed with which it has happened has largely took people by surprise.
And so now you're seeing a lot of research that would otherwise require years to take place is now trying to be done really rapidly in a matter of months.
And so it's created a lot of upheaval.
What about the Taiwan or the independence of all the protests?
We haven't heard about those in a while.
Like the Hong Kong protests?
Yeah.
Yeah, they everything went silent pretty quick because of largely on the Hong Kong protests.
Your hot take.
My hot take?
You probably expect them to come back sooner rather than later.
And I think it's because the virus more or less shut them down because everybody went into quarantine and everything.
And you could say rightfully so.
I mean, Hong Kong has had experience with these types of outbreaks before.
And so they understood that this was not necessarily a political thing.
They needed to respond to a public health crisis.
But I think once that public health crisis clears, I think you'll probably see a return of the Hong Kong protests because there was a lot of issues that were left unresolved as a result of it because the protests were ongoing.
They were happening more.
They were happening frequently.
And then this just kind of hit a very early pause button, you might say.
Yeah, Taiwan's a separate issue, though, because Taiwan's kind of interesting.
Hong Kong's actually part of China.
But Taiwan, China, the Chinese Communist Party claims is part of China, but obviously Taiwan does not buy into that or accept that.
How is it confused?
Yeah, and so Taiwan, To a certain degree, is probably going to be the bigger flashpoint coming out of this because they actually have handled the virus exceptionally well.
For being just a few dozen miles, or I think like 100 or so miles off the coast of China, having gone through some of these pandemics in the past, one would anticipate that this would be a pretty significant hotspot.
But Taiwan responded very quickly, adapted very quickly, and they were able to flatten their curve or whatever we want to call it.
They were able to reduce their cases really, really fast.
And this is not a good look for the Chinese Communist Party and their handling or mishandling of the virus in their own country.
And this comes exactly at the same time that they're trying to build their influence in international organizations, the World Health Organization.
And it was actually Chinese influence that helped push Taiwan out of the World Health Organization a while back.
And so now the question becomes: well, okay, I mean, should Taiwan be back in?
Because these guys seem to know what they're doing over there.
So, yeah, I think you can expect some more friction in the Taiwanese-China relationship.
And that does involve the United States because the United States has, ever since 1949, essentially, been the background defender of Taiwan.
And so, you know, spiking tensions between Taiwan and China are usually going to involve the United States in some respect.
So Bill Gates kicks the door down here and he's got his vaccine again and he charges you.
What do you do?
Duck.
Oh.
So you're anti-vaxxer, is what you're saying?
No.
I'm saying if he's going to do that, he probably hasn't put through a double-blind peer-reviewed study.
So it probably hasn't even been.
So once Bill Gates has the review, you'll take the vaccine.
Probably not.
You're not going to do the vaccine?
Does it have like Chinese trackers in it and all that?
No, it's just more of the situation of I kind of want to see if it works or not so far.
I mean, most of the tests and trials have proven to be busts up to this point.
And so, yeah.
No, I'm not going to just, even if it's Bill Gates coming to me and saying, like, hey, here you go.
I've perfected it.
I'm just going to be like, did you perfect Windows?
Like, if he, if he can perfect Windows and then tell me he has a perfect vaccine, maybe I'll consider him.
I got to say, I would sell you out.
I would point at you and then dive out the door.
Right.
Will that work?
Just get out of the way.
Your first.
Oh, he's going to be the biggest target.
I don't know.
He says, is Tim Malash here?
Where's Malash?
Where's Malash?
He threw me under the bus.
And get out of here.
He's what I do.
He's his max.
This is a side note question.
I've heard people talk about how South Korea combated the virus.
I've heard some people use, say that they basically doxxed their own people.
You don't even know what they mean by it.
Is that true or is that extreme language?
What does that mean?
I have no idea.
I'm not even sure.
They tracked him with their phone or something, right?
Oh, right.
So is it like phone tracking stuff?
They might have done it.
Something that wouldn't be legal here, is my understanding.
Like, we couldn't do it here unless we like to do it.
Yeah, so several countries have experimented with doing basically their contact tracing via phones, apps, whether it's apps or just GPS on the phones and everything like that.
And so there's been some discussion about it here.
I think Google and Apple have rolled out some kind of app that is supposed to do that.
I don't know if that will be widely used or accepted, but last I heard they were working on something like that.
But I can't really speak to what South Korea was doing in regard to that.
Part of me wouldn't be surprised.
They utilize tech pretty well in situations like that.
So I wouldn't be surprised.
But yeah, they don't necessarily have the legal constraints that would be the case.
Not just the legal constraints, but kind of like the cultural social constraint of you're not going to do that to me.
Yeah, you ain't going to follow me around on my cell phone.
Right.
Exactly.
And they tried doing it in Israel, but the Israeli Supreme Court struck that down because they invasion of privacy.
That's a little weird because they can use that for their stuff later.
Right, right.
I mean, yeah.
A little weird.
This one's just more obvious, right?
Great Wall of China.
Right.
Create really great?
Okay.
It's freaking long.
I mean, it's long.
It's a please don't swear on our show, though.
Okay, sorry.
You can flowerbed it or something.
He's a listener.
He said flowerbed.
Oh, yeah.
No, I listen.
You guys do a great job here.
So I would imagine it's great.
I would miss to see it.
Yeah, I would love to.
I have not been there.
I have not visited China.
Although I would.
I would love to.
Well, there's a branding thing.
You can't call it the okay wall of China.
Yeah.
People aren't going to call it.
Pretty good wall.
The pretty good.
Pretty good wall of China.
It just doesn't.
The meh wall.
The meh.
It doesn't really have the same.
But it doesn't quite ring.
Is the wall racist?
No, probably not.
But wasn't it to keep the Huns out?
That's from my understanding.
I've seen Mulan.
Yeah, and keep the Mongols.
The Mongols.
Yeah.
But in Mulan, it was the Huns.
Right.
And what we should learn from both the movie and history is that it didn't work very well.
They did just kind of go right over the wall.
Right.
Or around it, right?
I mean, it has ends.
It does have ends.
That's a secret.
You needed to go all the way around the whole world.
Right.
Right.
In Sid Meier's Civilizations does go around your key cities.
So it's a little inaccurate.
And all the way up to the next planet.
What's your favorite civilization game?
Four was actually really great.
I haven't played six yet.
Was four still on the squares?
Yeah, yeah, for the last of the hair was.
The hexes were pretty fun.
I mean, I enjoy five.
One thing I like about five is, at least in military stuff, you can be more tactical.
But the squares, you could just like stack all those units.
And then it's just like, okay, you just win by numbers.
I was a huge fan of two and Alpha Centauri, which you can take off into the stars.
That looks kind of cool.
That's pretty neat.
How accurate is civilization when it comes to international relations?
That's a great question because I really want to write an essay on that.
I've thought about this question.
Like Gandhi bombs you and stuff.
Yeah, Gandhi using nukes.
Probably not.
Although it's really funny in Civilization 5, that guy can be a real warmonger, which is hilarious.
I don't know what the deal was with the project.
So it's really interesting.
So in international relations theory, I'm about to get really into the weeds here, but there's two broad themes.
So Civilizations V is a video.
You've got this look of like, what are we talking about here?
It's a computer game.
You actually just speak in Chinese.
He's only ever played one video game.
It's Red Dead Redemption.
Okay.
And the Uncharted Games.
Okay, got it.
Okay, so this is basically a world-building turn-based strategy game.
It's a Civ game.
You get to play war.
Kind of.
You build a whole country.
You build a whole nation, not a city.
I'm sure people understand that.
And then you can attack each other.
So, yeah, so it's fascinating to actually, it's a good teaching tool, actually, to learn international relations and diplomacy, at least in an elementary sense, because in international relations theory, there's two broad camps.
There's the realist school and the liberalist school.
Now, there's other schools that are probably going to be offended that I didn't mention them, but these are really the two that get discussed the most.
So realism is basically just balance of power.
You know, the strong make the rules, the big guy wins.
And we can see how that is pretty present in today's international relations, right?
In fact, we could say China and Russia both utilize pretty strong realist foreign policies.
It's about zero-sum game, like I win, you lose type of thing.
And Trump, for the most part, has been a mostly realist president.
Now, the liberalist school is going to be more of the kind of like liberal values, like let's build open societies.
Let's build democracies.
Let's build individual rights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
That's the objective of foreign policies.
And it's more of the kind of like multilateral global cooperation, global village type stuff.
So those are two schools in international relations theory.
So when you get into the civilizations games, you actually see both schools working out in different place.
So in the gameplay, you see a lot of realism.
The moment your borders start bouncing up against another civilization's another civilization, the moment you start overtaking them in points and power, they declare war on you.
It doesn't matter who they are.
It doesn't matter how peace-loving they are.
They just declare war on you.
If you're next to Montezuma, God help you.
So he'll declare war on you before you get more powerful.
So that's a very realist interpretation.
So when it comes to the conflict dynamics of civilization games, it's very realist.
However, it's really funny how they utilize certain liberalist ideas.
So for example, you can win a victory by diplomacy victory by building the United Nations and getting everybody to vote for you to say you're the greatest because you won the game without war.
In Civilization 4, if you use nuclear weapons on somebody, it would create global warming and desertification in different places.
So you would have environmental degradation.
That's a very big area of liberalist focus is climate change and global action to change it.
So there's some dynamics of the game that very much borrow from liberalism, but then there's also these dynamics that are pretty hardcore realism.
And most people play the game as realists because it's just more fun.
It is more fun to send your tanks against their spearmen and you just run them all over.
Yeah, exactly.
Just those one-hit shots.
It's pretty great.
That's pretty cool.
Of course, beyond the receiving end of that.
Those are always the fun moments in Civilization 4 when you get invited by someone.
You're like, oh, it's just one soldier.
And then you hover and you see that they have like 50 guys on that tile.
Dang it.
And then the way the conflict works, the one spearman can always beat your tanks.
Right.
On that lucky roll or whatever.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Terrible.
I've had it happen.
Hezo, Ethan, do you want to join us again?
Welcome back.
Ever played Double Dragon?
Yeah.
There's probably some Chinese people in that.
Probably.
I don't know.
Never played it.
That's good.
I got naked.
We need one of those.
Dan, we need one of those camera shots where I can do like the gym look from the office and just I don't know if anybody and you guys are talking.
I was just there going like nerds.
Bunch of nerds.
All right.
So Chinese is China communist.
You said they weren't filthy committees.
Yeah, we didn't ask if they're Philippians and you keep talking about the community.
No, they're not Philik.
So are the commies and then like just not filthy?
What's the difference between because we're talking about the Chinese government and the Chinese people and that's what a lot of people think you're racist if you attack China, but it's like we're talking about the commies.
Yeah, and that's a great distinction to make.
And it's great that you make that distinction, that you make that distinction between government and people.
You call them the ChaiComs?
No.
Creative.
No, you could just call them the CCP.
I mean, like I said, foreign policy, we use really boring phrases.
That's the Russian Limbaugh.
If I have to write an article, I'll ask you to punch it up a little bit.
But no, it's a good distinction to make.
The Chinese Communist Party has ruled China since 1949 when Mao Zedong took over.
And the tough thing here is that we really don't know the degree to which the people of China support the Chinese Communist Party.
That's like the big unknown in tracking Chinese domestic politics.
China does a really good job locking down information in that country.
I mean, it's kind of one of the stranger, I guess, not strange, but just one of the more interesting examples of this is that Chinese diplomats can use Twitter, but the Chinese people can't.
And it's because Twitter is the public diplomacy outward facing.
And it's probably, you know, it's an American tech company.
You don't get to go into China unless you basically turn over all your secrets to them.
So, in that sense, it's very interesting that for the Chinese Communist Party, they are interacting with the world in a way the Chinese people do not, generally speaking.
Now, the Chinese Communist Party obviously has a wide membership, and so it's you know, it's in the probably hundreds of millions.
We're talking about a country that's 1.4 billion people.
It's for every for all intents and purposes, we can assume that there's a fair amount of support for the Chinese Communist Party and their government.
But that support is assumed to be based largely on their ability to deliver economic growth.
And that's more or less, especially in the case of President Xi Jinping.
That's a May he live forever.
Okay, there you go.
You're betraying your libertarian principles as you speak.
I'm trying not to get banned from YouTube, is what I'm trying to do.
Oh, I see.
Okay, good.
So, between the vocal affirmations and Ethan's business dealings, we should be dirty down.
So, all that to say, the Chinese Communist Party is, darn it, I totally sidetracked.
Oh, yeah, no, I got it now.
Yeah, so Xi Jinping has more or less built his legitimacy and his claim to ever-broadening powers on the promise of I will deliver economic good times kind of thing.
And so, if that's the core element of his leadership, if that's the core element of the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party currently in power, obviously they're going to take a hit from all this.
And so, there's some discussion over to how far that will damage their hold on power.
But at the same time, we don't really know the degree to which it'll undermine things.
And so, so, yes, we should make the distinction between the Chinese Communist Party and their ability to rule the country and then the masses of Chinese people who live their daily lives in China.
That should be a distinction that is made.
The difficulty with that distinction is we just don't know what we don't know how far the crossover goes.
And that seems to be a harder thing to determine.
But so, the government are filthy communists.
They are definitely communists.
I just want to be clear.
Filthy.
Can we get you to say filthy?
Probably not.
No, that's exactly right.
I teach foreign policy and diplomacy.
I study diplomacy.
And so I try to.
I have a couple of professors who would probably be very disappointed if I do think of communism as just unattached to any race.
Do you like communism?
What do you think?
Do you like it?
It's terrible.
So it's filthy without Chinese people?
Probably.
As an ideology in a vacuum.
Yeah.
So let's take it on.
It's nice.
I wrote an op-ed for discerned that was titled Socialism Demands Violence.
So that pretty much outlines how I feel about communism.
Okay, I like that.
Yeah.
So, yes, communism is very filthy.
It works in a family.
Everybody works in it.
It works great in a family.
In a family, right?
Yeah.
Well, it's a volunteer, right?
It's not socialism.
Yeah.
Right.
At that point, it's some kind of level of anarchy, right?
At that point.
Yeah.
Well, you have to have authoritarianism.
With all that benevolence and love, it works.
But yeah, apply it to a whole country.
It's insane.
Yeah.
Because what is the equivalent of a spanking on a global or a countrywide scale?
A gulag.
Exactly.
A gulag.
Why gulags are like spanking?
The Babylon Bee podcast grounds.
That's right.
It's like cheese.
That's what Chester Tim would say.
So why are they so mean to Christians over there?
What's their big, what's the big deal?
So this actually, and again, this is a distinction between communism as in the Chinese experience of communism and say communism in the Russian experience of communism.
So I think when we hear Chinese Communist Party and we think, oh, China's a communist country, we immediately look at it through the lens of the Cold War.
And the Soviet Union persecuted Christians.
And so it's just communism is atheist.
It persecutes religion and Christians are part of that.
All religions?
Yeah.
But in the case of China, it's a little different because there's a more complex history with Christianity in China.
And that history starts with missionaries from England, from Europe, from the United States that took Christianity into China.
In fact, Clyde Cook, the former president of Biola, he was president of Biola when I was there.
He grew up in a missionary family in China.
And so there's a long history of missionary activity in China and grew a flourishing Christian community in China.
Then you get to the turn of the 20th century, the early 1900s, and you have what became known as the Boxer Uprising or the Boxer Rebellion.
And this was essentially a group of dogs.
No.
I understand.
It's a breed of dogs.
MMA fighters.
They took over the whole streets.
No, actually, it's one of the lamest titles that you can give a group of people.
So the origin of the name is, I understand it.
Kung Fu related?
It is martial arts related.
And it came from the British.
Like the British just saw this group of people practicing the martial arts and they're just like, oh, they look like boxers.
And so they became known as the boxers.
It's lame.
It's totally a terrible title.
And especially, it's just kind of like the British couldn't even accurately describe what they were seeing.
But they're like, well, it looks like boxing.
So it'd be like if Japan rebelled in some way and we called it like the ninja rebellion.
Yeah, or something like that.
Yeah, it's kind of stupid.
But, you know, it goes down in history as the Boxer Rebellion.
Okay.
So anyway, it's hard to describe what this was, but essentially it was this movement to oppose Western influence in China.
And it was, you know, it was a time when it was at a time when we were in the middle of what has gone down in history, at least in Chinese history, as the century of humiliation, where China, a formerly, you know, global power, had just been subdued by the imperial powers, not just of Western Europe, but of Russia and Japan as well.
And so you had all this Western European influence, and there was this sense among certain groups in China that they were losing Chinese culture, Chinese identity, and things of that nature.
And so they took to basically trying to recapture that.
So practicing martial arts in public squares and everything, which they got their nickname.
But then when they rose up in rebellion, they started targeting areas that were considered to be Western influence or Western imports, and Christianity was one of them.
And so there was this wave of persecution and attacks on missionaries, but also Chinese Christians as well.
And so Chinese Christians have existed in China for a very long time.
And they've been persecuted for a very long time.
And so it would probably oversimplify it to say that this is just a function of communism in China.
As a cultural.
There's some kind of anti-Western pushback that's attached to it as well that has deeper historical roots.
And then that just gets merged with communism in a fairly toxic way.
So like in a small town, some guy moved in and opened up like a kebab shop, and then like these white redneck guys are like, we don't need none of that Arab stuff here and kicked him out.
Yeah, that'd be the equivalent.
Weird racist reason.
Yeah, exactly.
Like they just associate it with, it's not even, they don't know anybody the religion.
They just connect it to European-ness.
That's a dangerous word to say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So instead of the European flu, it was the European religion.
So I shouldn't go open a burger store in China.
I think there's McDonald's out there.
But if I went into a little town, and if you did it in 1905, yeah, then you'd be in trouble.
Like do it in globalized 2020.
I haven't been there, but I my understanding is that Asian cultures, especially like Japan and China, kind of romanticize America, American culture, at least like, I don't know if that's true.
Like even like when I'm here, I don't even understand why this happens.
But like Chinese people will want to take their picture with me.
Oh, is that because just because I'm a fat American, I think.
Like I'm a representative of something.
And so they don't know me from anything.
They just like, can I take a picture with you?
And then like, I can't do the voice.
What am I doing?
I'm in it with all respect.
Well, maybe.
Maybe you have a following over there.
They clearly knew enough to offer you money for it.
So you better get a movie that's going to get made.
You might actually have a fan base.
You have no idea.
But no, there's this weird, like, and that might be a good example.
That's not admiration.
That could just be like, look at this funny fat guy I found.
Right.
But I don't even know how to say it without it sounding really, I just know there's like a, it seems like there's a cultural fascination with American culture, but I guess we have fashion in the Chinese.
I'm curious if that's because if that's the backlash of the repression of Western culture.
I don't know.
I don't know what I'm trying to ask.
Well, I don't know.
There are definitely elements of American culture that have wide purchase around the world and in China too.
I mean, certainly American movies play very well in China with a little editing here and there.
You have basketball is huge.
Again, and that's kind of funny that that survived the boxer uprising because that was imported by American missionaries.
So it's kind of interesting that it's such a big deal over there.
I mean, it's huge.
So, you know, yeah, there's definitely elements of American culture that have purchased there, but I'm not sure the degree to which political values have purchase over there.
So we would have to draw a distinction between American culture.
Yeah, that seems to export really well.
Yeah, political culture.
No.
Well, checkered history on that.
Yeah.
To say the least.
All right.
Well, I think we may have solved all the world's problems.
I think so.
We did it finally.
We've got peace on earth and goodwill towards men.
Hopefully.
All that.
Yeah.
In general.
Cool.
So you have a podcast.
Oh, yeah.
I do.
Plug yourself.
Yeah.
Tim Talks Politics is the podcast.
Tim Talks Politics.
Yeah.
I liked the clicky sound.
Tim Talks Politics.
Tim Talks Politics.
Timalash.
Spit it out.
Milash.
You got to do like the Timalash show or something like that.
Right.
I'll keep that when I am done with doctoral studies and everything and have some more time to start a new podcast or something.
I'll have to think about that.
But yeah, Tim Talks Politics is the podcast.
And I do a weekly subscriber newsletter on current events in world news.
And I take it as a kind of a way to present the news cycle in a more balanced and less maddening way.
And I utilize international news sources and think tanks and stuff like that to kind of give a broad sense of what's going on in the world.
So those are the two things I do.
And people can go to TimTalksPolitics.com to find out more about it.
And oh, I should actually mention, people who subscribe who listen to Babylon B get a 30% discount on the newsletter if they go to TimTalksPolitics.substack.com backslash B.
We can put that on the screen, I think.
Yeah, people can click it for our YouTube.
Dan will be forced to type all that out, though.
Type it, Dan.
Yeah, thanks so much, guys.
I really like it.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for coming on the station.
That's fun.
Yeah.
Bye.
See you next time.
You're still here.
See you later.
It looks like I'm hanging up on someone, but they're not.
Bye. Bye.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
First question.
He might know these because he listens to the show.
Have you ever met Carmen?
Grew up Catholic.
So, I mean, yeah, my entire childhood, there's elements of evangelical pop culture run.
They don't have Catholic Carmen.
Would you say Arminians are Phil D. Have you ever been in a fist fight?
Yeah, my first experience on a short-term missions trip, there was something like a gang fight or something at a concert we were doing street ministry at.
And that wasn't a common concert.
This is another country.
Although who knows, maybe he had to go to other countries.
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