March from Saga here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

When I say welcome back to the Realignment, I am referencing the fact that this is technically

a emergency podcast. This is coming out on Friday, February 25th. We recorded this at 4.50

PM on February 24th. So insert all the statements about A, events, R, and rule changing over

time. B, because we don't have much time to edit. This is going to be pretty direct to

camera, pretty straightforward. So apologies for anything there that happens. And just

see, I just want to be clear, I kind of want to lock up to use the word emergency because

it suggests that we, you and I, Saga have these huge stakes that the world is awaiting

our take. When it's really just that we have an episode on PayPal coming out on Tuesday

and it feels totally discordant. Unmeaning of the moment to just let this go on marked

upon. So we have audience questions. We have our thoughts. How are you feeling, man?

Let's just take a please start. I mean, I'll be honest. I mean, I tweeted about this.

I did not believe the US intelligence estimates at all. So I don't want to be clear about

what I said by that. When they said things like X amount of troops are around Russia, that's

a fact and those mostly verified. So I was like, okay, like I'm not saying that that's

not the case. When they were like, there are kill lists. There are plans in order to

take Kiev. I was like, this is crazy. I was like, nobody's going to do this in the year

2022. And the reason I thought that is I genuinely thought that this was a posturing

exercise by Putin in order to ensure some sort of soft promise that Ukraine would never

be a part of NATO, which he got. And maybe some, I thought that the maximal case was total

annexation of denetsk and lajansk. And this is a full scale Pinsertak, Marshall. I mean,

while you and I are talking, there's already been over like, let's see, 57 Ukrainian soldiers

...