Welcome back to Geopolitics and Empire. As always, support the broadcast by becoming a paid

subscriber on Substack. If you are comfortable financially, you can also check out Supercast and Apple

subscriptions for the ad-free version. Joining us for the very first time is John Helmer. He's the longest

continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, or I guess was.

And the only Western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of a single national or commercial ties,

he first set up his bureau in 1989, making him the doyen of the foreign press corps in Russia.

He was born and educated in Australia, Then at Harvard, he also has been a

professor of political science, sociology, journalism, and an advisor to government heads in Australia,

Greece, the U.S. and Sri Lanka. His website is john helmer.org. The links are in the description.

Welcome, John. Thank you very much for having me. Good to see you again here, for you.

Yes, you know, we chatted a few years back on good old TNT Radio, where both you and I had a program.

I think you're, I held on a bit longer than you did.

And, you know, I enjoy very much your commentary, your website, your X feed.

I read other analysts such as Paul Kirk Roberts, who is often resharing your material.

And he's a friend of the podcast.

I think I've interviewed him like a dozen times.

But maybe to start, you know, my first question relates to navigating the disinformation space.

You know, I've noticed increasingly I'm not the only one.

Other good folks I follow are also lamenting that it's becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of what's going on abroad between mainstream reports,

even alternative media reports

that get stuff wrong, social feeds, AI garbage. And so maybe just to start there, do you

have any tips on how to establish basic, you know, baselines in terms of reality when it comes

...