Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in conversation with the Besties

Before the show proper, the recording picks up setup chatter: a host is reminded that the guest is not wearing earpieces, so crosstalk has to be kept in check and interruptions should be gentle. Questions will be directed to one person at a time, with follow-ups after.

The formal opening is then derailed by a short quarrel over how one host introduces the show, with a joke about self-absorption and a call to calm down. The host's pitch is that the podcast has been in the top 10 or 20 each week for two years and has a following in Washington.

The host says the show's political talk has resonated with particular communities, and that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is joining as one of the top 2024 presidential hopefuls. All candidates are to be invited for candid, unfiltered conversations, and this first one will be run like any ordinary episode with a list of topics.

Sacks's introduction is openly admiring and should be read as advocacy. He presents Kennedy as a first-time candidate at 69, the nephew of John F. Kennedy and son of Robert F. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who litigated against polluters, and a figure branded a "conspiracy theorist" because he questioned some pharmaceutical products and COVID restrictions. Sacks says many COVID conspiracy theories were later vindicated, citing a Tablet magazine line, and argues the candidacy revives a Democratic tradition of peace, free speech and anti-corporate-greed politics. These are his characterizations, not findings the conversation tests.

Sacks sets up the foreign-policy topic by saying Kennedy's tweets show deep understanding and echo his own view that the US risks a third world war over a country that is neither a treaty ally nor a vital interest. Kennedy first says he backed humanitarian aid, though warily, and mentions that his son left law school to join the Foreign Legion and fought near Kharkiv as a machine gunner. In his telling, his son shares his view that US decisions have been about prolonging the war.

Kennedy's core claim is that neoconservatives in the White House want regime change and the exhaustion of Russia, rather than Zelensky pushing the war. He cites Lloyd Austin's 2022 remark about degrading Russian forces and says Biden acknowledged removing Putin as an aim, and concludes this amounts to a war of attrition and the opposite of a humanitarian mission.

He then offers figures and military assessments as his own claims, none checked in the conversation: over 300,000 Ukrainian dead, hidden by both governments; a Russian kill ratio of between 5 to 1 and 8 to 1, which he links to leaked Pentagon documents; Russia unable to afford a loss; and a Russian artillery edge the West cannot match. Ukrainian youth, he says, bear the brunt.

On origins, Kennedy dates the story to 2014, when he says US officials, especially neocons, supported a violent coup against Ukraine's elected government. He argues that a strongly anti-Russian successor government alarmed Moscow about a Black Sea naval presence at Crimea, passed laws making Russian speakers in the Donbas second-class, and killed about 14,000 of them, triggering civil war. He condemns Putin as a gangster and thug but calls the Russian response not irrational. This is a one-sided causal account that the hosts do not challenge here.

Asked whether, as president, he would stop sending arms, Kennedy says he would immediately call a ceasefire and settle the war. He points to the 2014 Minsk agreement as the best settlement: an autonomous Donbas inside Ukraine, no NATO missile systems there, and Ukraine staying out of NATO.

Pressed on what happens if Zelensky wants to keep fighting, Kennedy repeats that he would settle the war and says Ukraine cannot fight without US support. A host summarizes this as telling Zelensky to settle or lose American backing, and Kennedy agrees. His position therefore rests on US leverage rather than Kyiv's consent.

Another host asks whether US policy induced the war by implying NATO entry. Kennedy answers that the US was running integrated military exercises with Ukraine and actively folding it into NATO forces, and that Putin had named this a red line from the outset.

Kennedy invokes his uncle as a model: a president's main job is keeping the nation out of war. He says John F. Kennedy limited the Vietnam commitment to 16,000 advisers, fewer than were sent to Mississippi for James Meredith, and signed an order two weeks before his death to bring the troops home by 1965, starting with 1,000. He says Johnson reversed this and sent 250,000 troops, as the military advisers wanted. These are his historical claims, offered without sourcing.

He also recalls his uncle's American University speech, which he says urged Americans to see the Soviet experience of World War II, with one in thirteen Russians killed. He contrasts that empathy with what he calls formulaic vilification, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, in which one side is pure evil and the other pure good.

A host asks him to compare recent presidents on this narrow dimension. Kennedy calls Biden a longtime friend and a go-to-war figure who has backed every war and never says no to one, which he thinks suits the party's powerful kingmakers. On Trump, he says he liked much of what he said about disentangling the country from constant wars, which he argues hollow out the middle class.

Finishing his comparison, Kennedy criticizes Trump for leaving the intermediate-range missile treaty. In his account, that removed a constraint on systems placed near Russia's border in places like Romania and Poland and, in his telling, Ukraine, which could reach Moscow within minutes. He calls it another provocation and argues for de-escalating such moves.

Citing George Kennan's question about why NATO still exists after the Soviet collapse, he asks why the West did not offer Russia something like a Marshall Plan. His argument is that treating Russia as an enemy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A host then asks whether he would put NATO expansion aside to end the conflict; the reply is an emphatic yes, with a voice noting that Biden will not. He claims the US promised not to expand NATO one inch east and has since added 13 countries. The promise and the count are his claims and are not examined here.

Asked how he would respond if Xi Jinping invaded Taiwan, Kennedy says he would de-escalate. He describes a war party in Washington that keeps pushing the conflict, and he would stop treating the situation as a present threat and let China and Taiwan work out their own relationship. He expects an end to US provocations to ease tensions naturally.