All right, this segment is on Ukraine and we've come into the Ukraine debate because we have two great writers and thinkers up here who are on slightly different sides of this issue of the US involvement in Ukraine.

Antonio Garcia Martinez writes is the author of the best-selling book Chaos Monkeys about Silicon Valley. He writes a substack called Pull Request and also has a great calling show.

Glenn Greenwald is back with us from yesterday. Also a phenomenal writer has an amazing substack all of you guys should check out as well and a great calling show.

So in setting up this topic, let me just say I think that in thinking about the US involvement in Ukraine, there's not a lot of debate about this topic and in that sense it's pretty similar to other wars that the US has gotten into.

Many of you probably are not old enough to remember when the US got into Iraq or Afghanistan and I'm not old enough to remember the US getting into Vietnam but the thing to understand about all those wars is that they were incredibly popular at the time that we entered them and by the time that they ended they were not.

And now I'm not saying I'm not prejudging Ukraine and saying it's one of those. I think there's important differences that we should get into but I think we should at least have this debate and we need more discussion around this and so for that I'm grateful that Antonio is left outside the debate.

So what I'm going to do is kick it to each of them for kind of five minute opening statements and then we'll just get into sort of more of a back and forth and we'll start with Antonio.

Cool thanks thanks David. Thanks for skewing the moderation from like literally the first act comparing it to Iraq because I come up here to say it's not about Iraq at all.

But yeah so let's just start off with I think probably most people here know that I actually spent some time in Ukraine. I'd like a lot of the independent voices who decided to a pine from afar but Ukraine I felt that the American media discourse about Ukraine was completely skewed and it just smell kind of bullshit into me and so I thought I had to go and actually see it.

And so I spent some time on the Polish border with Ukraine this was kind of in the earliest part of the war kind of early March and the western part of Ukraine which by the way is not particularly dangerous or anything is probably no more dangerous and walking across the differences go these days to be honest.

But it was interesting to actually go and see and I took away two things I wrote two steps that post about it that I want to share with you.

Two parts of the Ukraine story one the refugee situation is incredible it is something that you have to see to believe and even then you can't quite understand the scope of it 10 million Ukrainians fully a quarter of the country is currently displaced something like six million Ukrainians have left in the span of two months when you stand at the border at

Medika which is one of the border crossings with Poland what you see is you're you're you're at it and you realize you're at the fringes of sort of normal you know western European life and you've entered on the other side of that is hell that people are escaping and what do you see you see again the men can't leave because they're prohibited from leaving because they're because they have to fight and so you see is old people or women with children imagine a woman in her 30s with two kids a little rollie bag and like a cat in a bag like that's the typical thing and just a line of them going over the border again and again and again.

And the polls have been amazing and how they received the Ukrainians literally millions of Ukrainians but all the same as an enormous strain everywhere you go in eastern Poland or western Ukraine that the big open area is basically a refugee camp whether be a train station repurposed warehouses all of it the human situation is just kind of mind-boggling.

The other thing I'd like to share across the border it was weird crossing the border there's this line of people looking to leave and there's like you with my little starlink and my little bag and my little body armor like walking across the other way because you can't take cars across everyone walks across and everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy because why are you walking in the other direction bro.

I walked in the other direction had a driver pick me up experience a little bit of western Ukraine for a few days and I experienced what I think probably nobody here has experienced directly which is total war right a society that's completely and totally mobilized to repel for an invader right I was in a city called Leviv which is one of the western cities that sort of free Ukraine and everything there is either men and weapons and trucks going east or women and children and refugees going west that's all you would see that's all that would happen there and all of society from the interpreter I had because unfortunately I speak no Ukraine.

To the driver who drive me around to the hacker I interviewer who was like de-dossing Russian websites all of them would punctuate their statements with we will win right and that's when I realized that the big mistake that everyone had made I think particularly in the US discourse is underrating Ukrainian resolve and there is zeal for their own nationalist project right after

after spending a day there and again remember this is relatively early days of the war key is still encircled it was unclear if the bell of russians would start a western front it was all still up in the air but I was starting to think you know I don't see how the Russians win this like this just seems impossible Ukraine is the size of Texas as a population of 40 million people

roughly the size imagine the russians showing up with 200,000 soldiers and trying to control California it's going to be very difficult to do particularly when literally everybody is staring at you saying we will win which is what happened and that's when I realized that this whole story was very different than it's being projected in the United States and that's I felt vindicated in going because I think there aren't that many American journalists there and I think a lot of the discourse in the US tends to skew towards Iraq or towards projection of American political domestic neuroses and not the facts on the ground in Ukraine in which you have the most important and important things we can do is to make sure that the rest of the world is going to be in the US and to be able to get back to the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be

able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to be able to see the US and to do that by in some ways is just a fact that, inside this world is going to have to worry a little bit about where we go

But in terms of the population by going for whatever it is a week or 10 days to a kind

of sliver of that country that has extremely different views than another region.

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