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Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the buck sexton show. I have Michael Tracy with me now. He is a journalist with really

interesting opinions on foreign policy. A perspective we're going to want to hear specifically on Ukraine and he also has a great

sub stack Michael Tracy sub stack. Go check it out and follow him on Twitter. Mr. Tracy coming to us live

out of Deutschland. So now you're over in Germany right now. Let me let me start there actually. What

what's the feeling in Germany about the largest war in Europe in 80 years?

Yeah, well first off greetings. I would do a German greeting but I'm just so pathetic at even adopting like basics of the linguistic context that I was

supposed to be in. And in part because you know coming to this conference this was the Munich security conference that just concluded in here in Munich where I am now.

And like so it's all these people flying in from all over the place. So there's not really an expectation that you have to

acclimate it all to the local customs. So nobody really expects that you're going to speak German and they probably wouldn't anyway.

Frankly, but it was even less of a burden to do so this time for my for this trip. Which is kind of embarrassing because I feel like an

American American. But when we have more time, I'll tell you when I went to a Swedish counterterrorism conference and ended up

partying late night at a nightclub with Danish Swedish and I think Finnish federal police. So you know, fun things could happen in that part of the world.

Okay, so how do they feel or what's the sort of tenor or what's the just general sense that you can pick up from the conference. Well, first of all, I should disclose.

That the whole system that this conference had set up for press was quite peculiar and you'd almost get a sneaking suspicion that they didn't really particularly want the press to have full access to the conference so they could make inferences about what the tenor was.

So just let me explain it to you real quick because this is amazing and no journalist who I spoke to at this conference had ever seen or experienced anything like it or even heard of it.

So as best I can tell, it's like an unprecedented thing at least for this particular conference and maybe just, you know, conferences of this sort writ large with this being get up premium security conference for the, you know, basically, you know, the rules based international order.

So you have to stop his sign up ahead of time to get a press credential, which is standard. But once you arrive and are issued the press credential.

You can't just then waltz in to the venue as you might anticipate, right? You have to go to a press sort of monitor or a selection of staff who have this booth or this room set up.

And in order to get into the main venue, which is a hotel right in the center of like the old city of Munich.

In order to get to the hotel, you then you have to declare a specific purpose or a specific destination or a specific ask for why you're entering the hotel number one.

And then number two, you also have to be escorted the entire time. They actually call it an escort system that you're in the hotel by one of these like 20 year old German guys who they have lined up.

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