Summer is here and we're as busy as ever at the DSR Network.

Our podcast schedule has expanded to include the DSR Daily Brief, DSR Foreign Policy, DSR Politics,

the DSR Spy Show, Words Matter, Foreign Office with Michael Weiss, Next in Foreign Policy,

and the Secret Life of Cookies. To celebrate our expansion, we're bringing you this special offer.

Through the month of June, membership is 50% off. Members receive an ad-free listening experience,

bonus content across all of our podcasts, an evening newsletter, an invitation to join the DSR

Slack community and more. To take advantage of this offer, visit the DSRnetwork.com-by and

enter code DSRExpans, all one word. That's the DSRnetwork.com-by and code DSRExpans. Thank you for

your support. I'm Zoe Weinberg and this is Next in Foreign Policy. The podcast where the next

generation of national security and foreign policy leaders talk about the issues of today and tomorrow.

This week, we're joined by Aaron Schwartzbaum. Aaron is a fellow with the Eurasia program at the

Foreign Policy Research Institute. He currently hosts the institute's Bear Market Brief,

the Continent, and Report and Short Podcasts. Previously, he's worked at both Data Miner and

Premise Data. Aaron, welcome to the show. Wonderful to be here today. So, one of our first

questions that we usually ask a lot of our guests is, how did you first become interested in your

field of work, specifically in Russian foreign policy? Yeah, so there's two pieces of that question

here. The first is the language piece, how I get into the Russian language. That's kind of a

funny offbeat story. I used to fence in high school and I had a coach from Moscow who had a,

shall we say, more brutal approach to coaching than a lot of my American coaches did. And

long story short, kind of wanted to understand what he was yelling at me every lesson. So,

then I spent what, it's now about 14 years learning. It turns out, wasn't very polite, but yeah,

I stuck with the language, the fencing not so much. And then the other piece here is a very intense

...