I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

And welcome to another episode of a car accident

today we have somebody who is going to tell us about this

geopolitical world we have going on around us.

A lot of people think it's on fire.

I just think it's another day in the week.

But Simon Schuster is going to be here to educate us all.

How are you doing today my brother?

Thank you, really good to do with you. Thank you for having me.

No, thank you so much.

So this is where we are.

I start each one of our shows by having our guests walk us through the arc of their careers and you're at time now and you've been reporting on Russia now for well over a decade.

How did you get into reporting on Russia and when did you realize that being a journalist would be your

calling? Yeah, thank you for the question. So I realized that journalism would be my calling when I just tried

reporting for my college newspaper, the Stanford Daily.

I'd been doing some writing before that,

and then a friend of mine recommended hey if you like writing so much why

don't you try writing an article instead of writing short story so I gave it a try and

realize pretty quickly that that is the thing I wanted to do. And as for the Russia

Ukraine reporting, I have Russian, I'm a native Russian speaker. So my family came as refugees to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1989 when I was six years old and we spoke Russian at home and in journalism fluency in languages tends to be a bit of a superpower

certainly as competitive advantage. So I after university I moved to to Moscow and

...