I'm Derek Thompson, longtime writer with the Atlantic magazine on tech culture and politics.

There is a lot of noise out there and my goal is to cut through the headlines, loud tweets, and hot takes in my new podcast,

Plain English. I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know to give you clear

viewpoints and memorable takeaways. Plain English starts November 16th. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever

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Barclays, here for the land of football. Ladies and

gentlemen welcome back to the death taxes and bananas podcast now I know you all missed me last week

But I want to assure you that the only time that I'm going to miss one of the episodes and I'm not going to do one is if there is a very good reason as to why I didn't and I don't know if I could have chosen a better reason than what I basically was involved in last week and that was I did somewhat of an impromptu humanitarian mission over to Poland and then into Ukraine.

This hands down was one of the rewarding scariest eye opening anxiety riddled experiences that I have ever had and that's including you know everything that I've done on the challenge my

travel show just through 39 years of life. I was contacted by a friend of mine

named Scott who basically has a whole network of influencer type public figures that he works with.

He had someone reach out to him who's a philanthropist and who works in very close contact with a Polish humanitarian organization called Humonash about getting someone to come out who would not only be willing to help but would also be willing to

provide a platform, provide context and provide, of not just what is going on in the ground there, but what this organization does their focus.

It's an absolutely incredible organization called Humonash.

It's run by a husband and wife named Peter and Katia.

They've been around since 2010.

They started out as a shelter for refugees from Belarus, Afghanistan, and Tibet, and now they've obviously

shifted their focus and their resources to helping refugees from Ukraine and helping in the war effort in any way that they can.

So I was contacted on a Thursday night and he's like this is obviously a time is of the essence can you be on a red-eye flight Saturday

And I agreed Saturday night. I was on a red eye to New York

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