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Hi, Andrew.

Hey, Bob.

How you doing?

I'm good. I have a visual icebreaker in the style of, Hi, Andrew. Hey, Bob. How you doing?

I'm good. I have a visual icebreaker in the style of Mickey Cous. Oh, good. I was worried that this would be too formal. What is, is that some Roman? What is that? Not quite. No, a Viking? Is that a Viking? It actually is. You know, I have Viking blood. I don't want to get, I don't want to make this all about me, but I just got my, um, Ancestry.com thing a couple weeks ago. Oh, really? Like, I thought you were like Scottish. Are you Scandinavian? It turns out I've got, what was it, 12 or 16% Swedish and Danish. Okay. Well, you have that in common with this guy, actually. Who is that guy?

So this is. Swedish and Danish. Okay. Well, you have that in common with this guy, actually. Who is that guy?

So this is Rurik, or maybe to approximate the Russian pronunciation, Rurik.

And he was the Viking chieftain of the Rus people who was invited to reign in Novgorod in the year 862, which is when the

Russian state started to exist as a centralized state.

And you would know that, Bob, if you had watched Tucker Carlson's interview of Vladimir

Putin, because Putin opened up with a, I think you can call it a soliloquy, a historical

soliloquy that lasted about an hour in which he went all the way back to the 800s and talked

about the deep roots of Russia. And arguably, actually, I think definitely was making a case for why we shouldn't

think that the Ukrainian people even exist. And even though you didn't watch this interview,

I kind of wanted to ask you about something related to that, because it's related to

NATO expansion and all this stuff that we've talked about. But maybe we should introduce

the Earthling unplug first. What this thing

is? Yeah, this is

Earthling Unplugged. You're Andrew Day.

I'm Robert Wright.

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