It Could Happen Here - Ukraine Aid with Charles McBryde

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

Robert and Shereen are joined by humanitarian advocate Charles McBryde to talk about the importance of continuing military aid to Ukraine and what we can do to support Ukrainian independence.  Misson Kharkiv missionkharkiv.com  Substack: @CharlesMcBrydeIG: @CharlesMcBrydeTT: @CharlesMcBrydeThreads: @CharlesMcBrydeTwitter: @McBrydeCampbell  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some

fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast or wherever you get your podcast. CoolZone Media. Okay, hello. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Shereen. Today I am joined by, you know him, you love him. It's Robert. Hi, Robert.

Ah, someone knows me and loves me. That's nice. Robert's here today to talk with me to Charlesles mcbride but i met charles fairly fairly recently doing just pro-palestine stuff online and i really liked his work he's here to talk about some things that i think are very important like ukraine and why helping ukraine is not the same thing as as aid to is Israel and all that good stuff. And yeah, let's just get right into it. I want to know your experience with Ukraine. Can you just tell us a little bit about that first? Sure. First of all, thank you, Shireen, so much for having me on.

This has been one of my favorite podcasts for a while. So this is kind of a slightly surreal moment. Going into my experience with Ukraine, I double majored in history and comparative religion in college. And I was kind of interested in sort of the post-Soviet sphere. And I worked on some kind of post-Soviet issues when I lived in Washington, D.C. after school. um and also was deeply interested in eastern orthodox christianity which is kind of why i took an interest in in that region so i remember in like 2015 i i watched this vice video called uh russian roulette that popped up on my youtube feed and it just completely it just put ukraine on the map for me in a way that i'd never really thought about before i thought of it as the ukraine on the map for me in a way that i'd never really thought about before i thought of it as the ukraine um yeah my yeah my my muscovite russian history professor had always talked about it as a part of russia yeah um and she had denied you know i was during the maidan the revolution of dignity i was in college and she denied that ukraine had any autonomy she echoed all the

putinesque sort of talking points about cia intervention and neo-nazis and stuff and i didn't really know what what i didn't know at that point um so then i i yeah i got i got interested in in sort of what was happening in the lead-up to the russian invasion and i had been following following this guy who went over to Syria a couple of years ago named Aidan Aslan. And in my conversations with Aidan, he'd sort of told me a little bit about kind of what stuff was going on in Ukraine. And I got very interested and I was following him and all of his friends and what they were doing. And at that point, I had, you know, about four or five years of nonprofit humanitarian experience under my belt, as well as sort of a historical,

political understanding of the region. And so when the war happened, when the full-scale invasion happened, I immediately started trying to fundraise, trying to help out, trying to educate. And mostly to try and cut through russian propaganda because there were a lot of people in my sphere who were just retweeting straight up russian propaganda they were elevating you know what what you and i know who are basically

kremlin adjacent um individuals in the united states who have sway in leftist circles, some of whom have reemerged in the Palestine discussion, much to my chagrin. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure we'll talk about that more later. I would love to get into that. Yeah. And so, yeah, my hope was to kind of to do that. And as I was sort of working with Ukrainians, one of the things they said is, hey, man, everything happens here. You have to be in Ukraine for to get anything off the ground.

So you need to come here. I'm like, are you insane? It's there's a war going on in your country. So I said, yes. And are you insane? Yes. Yes, I am. In retrospect.

So the second week of the war, I booked a plane ticket, flew over there, crossed the train to Poland, scared out of my mind, got in touch with the Ukrainians I'd been talking to previously. And after a mad hustle from the train station, was very comfortably drinking tea in a cute little apartment in Lviv with somebody's grandmother and was like, this is a crazy experience. So I spent two months in Ukraine at the beginning. My intention was to sort of identify gaps in the medical supply chain, particularly things that were going to be initially overlooked in the mad dash of refugees and resettlement and all that sort of stuff. And one of the things we identified was like prescription medication for people coming from the east to the west and yeah i think it's important that not a lot of realize that people coming from eastern ukraine a lot of them had never visited cities like levive until the start of full-scale invasion predominantly russian speakers and you know for them levive was was almost like going to poland and it was a very

new thing for them but you know your your medical going to poland and it was a very new thing for them but you know your your your medical issues don't stop just because someone invades your country in fact oftentimes they get worse and so what i was trying to do initially was was find a way to address that and that led me into contact with rostislav filenko, who's one of my dear friends and the co-founder of the organization that we started together called Mission Harkiv. So that organization worked initially on prescription medications and then started distributing high-end oncology drugs, which are very difficult to transport, very lucrative to steal, and very difficult to store because they have to

be kept at a constant temperature. So we focused on those things while everybody else was focusing on tents and, you know, and clothes for refugees and that sort of stuff. And as a result, we carved out a very interesting niche in terms of the humanitarian response and are still, you know, going strong with that today. And so that was initially kind of why I went over there for that first two months. And since then, I've been back over to film a documentary, sort of an artistic short documentary called Note of Defiance. And then I was involved with another documentary project, which is hopefully forthcoming in the next year. Nice. Yeah, I don't think I've talked about this on the show, but kind of my relationship with Ukraine and eventually going over there and starting to

report on what was happening started, weirdly enough, as a result of the fact that I had friends who went to the big Burning Man event in Nevada, and I wound up traveling with one of them in India, this Ukrainian woman who lived in the bay. And when stuff started in late 2013, which is when the Revolution of Dignity is kind of the common Ukrainian name for it, you'll also hear it referred to as like the 2014 revolution or the Maidan revolution, they're all talking about the same thing, which is when the guy who was the president of Ukraine trying to make himself into a dictator, this dude, Viktor Yanukovych, who is this incredibly wealthy oligarch who literally built a golden palace for himself with like a fake lake that had a boat on it that was a restaurant for just him for like the level of rich oligarch asshole we're talking about here,

him for like the level of rich oligarch asshole we're talking about here um cracked down really brutally on a student protest which it kind of culminated in this kind of escalating occupation of the center square in the capital that basically got built into an ice fortress in like the middle of the ukrainian winter this very very like pretty epic story of of successful resistance because this guy is eventually forced out the police riot unit the bear coot who had done had been like literally killing people by dropping them naked in like ice drifts and stuff are disbanded it's a really remarkable story and i just kind of fell into it because my friend uh connected me with a couple of people who were on the ground there who were friends of hers who were ukrainians in

the tech industry who traveled to uh the u.s every year or so for burning man and so when this occupation of the maidan started they were like well we know how to like we're used to making soup and food for large numbers of people and like running little chunks of a camp so we'll just start we'll just do the thing that we do at our, our camp out over in my Don. And they were part of the thing they were part of was the auto my Don, which was this like mobile unit of resupply where people would like basically drive supplies to and from different areas of occupation in the city.

It was a pretty dangerous job as things escalated, but that was my end. And I wound up talking to like, I don't know, 20 or 30 people like actively the entire time the occupation was going on. There's like two folks I never was able to get back in touch with who just kind of like dropped off at a certain point. Like it was a really sketchy time for a lot of people, but I wound up traveling there the year after, right after the early part of

the invasion started to report from Avdivka which is you know was had been under siege for a year at that point and is still under siege today for an idea of like that's a decade now basically that that this this little town has been shelled yeah anyway yeah i didn't know that about burning man that's oh it was a weird way to get connected to it yeah i just got a message from this friend of mine who's like hey somebody some buddies from my camp are like trying to overthrow their government do you want to talk to them i was like well yeah that sounds pretty dope yeah that's that's your mo that's wild you know burning man really does the playa provides it really connects all doesn't it

i have some weird like tangential burning i've never been but i have like neither have i actually yeah i have like burning man devotees who play a large role in my life and it's just very interesting yeah yeah the the weird little connections you get and i was kind of disappointed you know to me this was because the whole time especially like the late 2013 early 2014 as this was going on i was like well they're probably all going to get killed right like just you know we we were several years in the syrian civil war at this point like i was not optimistic um and that's not what happened and then the there was like this counterpoint of realizing a few years later that oh a shocking number of people on the left think it was a bad

thing that they overthrew their government. Yeah. Which, yeah, I guess gets us into, like, the kind of thing you wanted to talk about, which is the difference in providing military aid to Ukraine versus Israel. Yeah. Which, I don't know, I mean, from my standpoint, it's pretty obvious, right? it's pretty obvious, right? Like, one country is fighting a military that has a massive industrial base much more powerful than it, and is killing large numbers of civilians. And they have proven their ability with military aid to react effectively to this invasion. And the other case, I don't think I need to explain which one, but it's Israel, is a country with a massive arms industry that is fighting people who have no arms industry of any kind and primarily killing civilians. So I can very easily justify one of those groups of people getting U.S. weapons and one of them not needing any additional weapons.

That's where I am. See, Robert, none of that is justified because of the existence of the Azov Battalion. There is no right for any Ukrainian grandmother to get access to her insulin because there's a couple of neo-Nazis that were stationed in Mariupol. But truly, that is about how sophisticated a lot of the leftist critiques of the ukraine of supporting ukraine are yeah i think a lot of it comes in one of the things that i talk about and i talked with shireen about this when when we went on instagram live together is that a lot of leftists seem to live in kind of a weird little cinematic universe where only the us and israel can be the bad guys and by extension france and the uk you know and yada yada um but as a result of that they have this just really strange view of global affairs that literally no one in the

countries they're talking about share somehow russia and iran and china and cuba are all aligned in a sort of anti-imperial axis because they oppose the interests of nato and the united states and i think that's just so that's that's patently ridiculous but it plays a big role in conversations like what's going on in palestine yes people will invoke well why are you giving all this money to ukraine uh instead of giving money to people the relief for the maui fires or you know doing why aren't we doing medical medicare for all so it's like it's a convenient because it's the military industrial complex it's the iraq war it's all these things that we as leftists were taught to hate but it's they're being used for good it's like america's actually being the

arsenal of democracy and doing the thing that we did in World War II that helped the Soviet Union march into Berlin. Well, and it's also, I think an important thing to note is when we talk about the, it's always framed as the US is giving this amount of money to Ukraine. What's happening is we are taking stockpiles of arms we already have worth that much money and we are sending them there. Like, they're not... Right. Like, that is overwhelmingly like the... what kind of aid we are sending over.

So these are extant weapons that are sitting in the US doing nothing and being... like the Bradleys. We didn't just build a bunch of new Bradleys. We had a shitload of them. We weren't using them anymore

because they were not very useful in the conflicts that we were fighting. Right bradley is high mars yeah exactly same with the united states is like really itching to like need high mars right now no like all of this stuff we're sending to them has been mothballed for basically since the gulf war and people don't understand that it is funny to me to imagine like yeah let's send that stuff to to maui for the fires that's what they need is they need long-range artillery that's really gonna that's really gonna help them heal i'm in favor of sending lethal aid to to the indigenous residents of maui but i think that's it that's a separate conversation you know you talk to me and do it and i think we have enough mothballed tanks for both of these causes.

Yeah. I think for me, the comparisons for Ukraine and Palestine, it started with how it was presented in the media. It just, it rubbed people the wrong way when the Ukrainian struggle was presented in a certain way and the Palestinian struggle was not. And people can draw like comparisons. Sure.

Like whiteness and all this stuff. Absolutely. And it really irritates me because it's not like the oppression Olympics. We're not trying to compare or demonize Ukrainians. We should demonize the media for not representing Palestinians in the right way. But I think that is kind of the origin of the comparison that I saw anyway. Yeah. And I think that that's really worth digging into because there's a couple of first off,

it is absolutely an injustice that Ukrainian resistance and that like is seen as inherently just and not just Palestinian resistance is demonized or often ignored, but like all sorts of resistance by people who are being harmed around the world, it partially is, or in large part, as a result of like US and other Western countries policies are not seen in the same light as Ukrainian resistance. I certainly agree with that stance. That's not the fault of anybody in Ukraine, right? This is not, we are not talking about a country that exercises power on the global stage. We are talking about a cash poor nation that is, has been struggling with Russian imperialism for most of the time that most

of the people listening, there's actually all of the time that everybody listening to this has been alive in one form or another. Right. Yes. And so I think it's perfectly fair to point out the ways in which the media reports unequally on these conflicts and what's happening in Palestine, what's happening on stuff like Buka and on the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza. Right. I think that that is worth pointing out.

But it's also not worth blaming Ukrainians over. They are not participating in that just by saying, hey, it's bad that our civilians are being massacred by rockets. Right. And other forms of weaponry, by the way, like that, right? That's not on them. Yeah, I think to also kind of flip that on its head. I mean, part of it is the media narrative, you know, it's easier. Ukrainians are mostly hot white people in the eye of the Western media. And it's easy to cheer for the hot white people who have, you know, everyone, everyone, a lot of people have been to Ukrainian restaurant restaurant they're familiar with some ukrainian maybe songs so they have friends if they live in a place like la or new york you know ukrainians you're familiar maybe even with some

ukrainian media and it's and it's kind of like this accessible thing you know and also like there's other aspects of it to which are even stranger which is that ukraine produces like a huge amount of the world's fashion models like that's a very accessible thing for people to get behind in the nice liberal media and you can see these in these initial broadcasts being like i've never seen anything like this with seeing all these european looking refugees and it's like all right there are multiple newscasts like that where they're like these are not arabs like they say it with their chest you know like these are these are people like us but for the the flip side of that is that that leftists are reluctant to be charitable to ukrainians because they also see them as hot white people who don't

need any help yeah and i and they're they're unwilling to admit that ukrainian ukrainians like gossens also suffer from a settler colonial state as their neighbor with a history of ethnically cleansing and genociding them yeah i mean part of the reason for that is that the the neighbor that ethnically cleansed in gen well one of them because actually they had several neighbors ethnically cleansed and genocide them but the soviet union like did a significant amount of that during the whole of dulmore now the germans also carried out a massive genocide in ukraine like and by the way a huge number of the red army soldiers who successfully helped defeat the nazis were ukrainians as a note they this is you often see this thing where people will point out

you know there were a significant number of ukrainians that fought with the nazis and they tend to ignore that, like, yeah, and there were even more Ukrainians who fought with the Red Army. Like, both of those things happened. It was a world war, and Ukraine was right in the middle of it. It's a very ugly situation, and it kind of comes down to this inability of a lot of people to, not even nuance, to care about accuracy when that accuracy is not like ideologically convenient, when it points to some of the ugliness and messiness of war. I find that very frustrating. Like I sympathize with because I was reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis from the refugee trail right after actually I was in Ukraine. And it is unfair that like, Ukrainian refugees were treated differently. But the people to blame for that is the news media, not refugees who have lost

their homes. In fact, I suspect that a lot of Ukrainians have a different attitude themselves towards the suffering that they witnessed during that period of time, because they've now been through it. It's just like a human human thing now you know what that's like yeah i mean as a syrian person who oh for the past like over a decade i really the media really fucking got on my nerves every time i would see them not talk about syria or when they did it was not a good way and then when they started really embracing ukrainian refugees or talking about them in a different way i'm not gonna lie it made me mad but not at ukrainians like i think even now we should have criticized the media back then but like

they're doing the same thing now with their fucking headlines about israel and palestine it's always how it's presented versus the people it's presenting like when someone when some dumb newscaster is standing in front of a group of ukrainian refugees behind him and he's like these are not arabs these are white people they didn't say that he did so yeah i don't know yeah and also like i i encourage everyone to ask ukrainian particularly eastern ukrainians opinions on the western media and like westerners in general, because two years into this war, they have a lot of them. And I imagine that they would, you would find a lot of those sentiments shared by the Ukrainians. They don't always appreciate how they're portrayed in the Western media as, you know, either brave defenders of their country

or soot covered refugees coming off of a rail car. You know they they have a lot of opinions on on these sorts of things they feel patronized they feel babied in some senses um and they feel like they will be ultimately abandoned by us which is already coming to pass yeah yeah and as the attention shifts to things like gaza you know it's difficult for them to feel like they have any friends yeah no i want to get into that but let's take our first break and we will jump back in. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more.

After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture,

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Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Okay, we had just been talking about how the support for Ukraine has kind of changed recently. Can you get into that a little bit?

I'm not even necessarily sure that it changed so recently. I remember being over there and it was wall to wall coverage from, from the moment I set foot, you know, from the moment it started to really up until the Oscars and the Chris Rock slap is what we all talked about. Like last Oscars. This is, yeah, the last Oscars. And the Chris Rock slap and all the attention that that got was the moment that a lot of the volunteers talked about is the moment where people started to want to forget about Ukraine.

There was still a lot of coverage, but suddenly it was like, you don't have to be obsessed with Ukraine. But suddenly it was like you don't have to be obsessed with Ukraine. You know, Ukraine is now a second page story instead of a first page story that was around the same time that the Russians withdrew from Kiev. So suddenly there wasn't this expectation that Kiev was going to fall and the capital would be taken and Zelensky would be captured. And it started to slow up even then. You know, the donations dried up, the attention dried up. And by the time I went there in the winter of 2023, last year, it was like people already wanted to forget. I mean, I live in Los Angeles and a lot of people here were saying things like, oh, wow, is that still going on over there? Really nice, well-meaning people who knew

I'd been over there. They were just like, is that, you know, is that still a war going on? Here we are in 20 days, it's going to be two years of this. And my friends over there are exhausted and they don't, they're now a page eight story. Yeah. And it's, this comes back to like how Americans like to think about conflict. We have an enormous appetite for war and for, you know, particularly what we consider a just struggle for up to a couple of months, right? And then people were very excited when, yeah, the Russians invade, everyone, the expectation, both from like military experts in the West and from certainly civilians, is that like Russia's going to crush them immediately. And then they don't. There's this real upset come from behind underdog victory and Americans love that.

But then like, it's not a total immediate victory. And in fact, it turns into at this point and really, really brutal, ugly, slow war of attrition and maneuver, which is like what war is, right? Like that's how any sort of near-peer conflict is going to boil out. And it's not a kind of thing that is resolved quickly, and it's not a kind of thing that is resolved without cost. And as soon as that became clear, Americans, it doesn't fit into that like 90-minute Hollywood vision of how a conflict is supposed to go, right? There was no, the Ukrainians didn't blow up a Death Star and end it, right? Like, I mean, actually, that's not what happens in the movies either. But like, it's still, it was not the quick, clean end that a lot of people were expecting and hoping for. And as a result, people are like, well, now it's a quagmire.

And now it's like, we have to start looking for some way out of this thing, which, by the way, has cost us very little. My stance on when is this over is like, well, I guess when Ukraine says it's over, right? If the Ukrainians want to come to the negotiating table and negotiate an end to hostilities, then that's their business. But up until that point, I think the business of the united states is to continue to meet our treaty obligations which we should we should note like the united states and nato are obligated to support ukraine in a war over its sovereignty because they gave up their nukes with that understanding right this is what happened

when we told the country yeah yeah we said you give up your nukes and we got your back like this is this was the promise we made and as far as i'm concerned that's the only interest i have and like my answer is like how long should we support them well as long as they're fighting and we've been keeping that promise for the cost of five percent of our defense budget and like you mentioned earlier it's it's it's already stuff that's mothballed since the gulf war sitting around waiting to be used you know i mean the idea of giving them f-16s every every country in the world practically see at least in the nato alliance it seems like everyone has an f-16 i think yeah we're giving them to turkey now too like it's not a big deal to give a couple of f-16s to the ukrainians or a couple of bradleys or abrams or what have you and i think that people especially on the right but but also on the left

who get obsessed over the amount of money that we're sending or the amount of equipment and personnel especially when they see these stories about corruption they don't they don't understand the scale of how small this actually is relative to the united states other commitments like to israel and yes they get um they get sort of myopically focused on this uh and they use it as a reason to to dislike ukraine the right will never like ukraine because zelinski was the guy who made trump look bad and got him impeached i think it's that simple yeah it's wild that like well also, also, I mean, the Russian interference and stuff, you know, the Republican Party now resembles Russia more, but it's wild that Republicans, you know, 30 years ago were super anti Russia. And now

they're Russia's best friend. And they think Ukraine or sort of Satanist, whatever. Yeah, to and on corrupt people. And it's a for to kind of emphasize how small 5% of the Defense Department budget is, the Pentagon, this is from like a 2022 story, the Pentagon can't account for several trillion dollars in assets, which doesn't mean we don't fully know where they are. But it means that like, Pentagon record keeping has sort of like, lost huge amounts of assets over the years. lost huge amounts of assets over the years. At the moment, like right now, the Pentagon, like as of November 2016, had failed six audits in a row. And as far as I can tell,

I don't think they've actually ever passed an audit of like all of their resources. Like there's huge amounts, trillions of dollars in assets that like we can't fully document. It's when you think about like the amount of money that we've actually sent over there as a defense or as a percentage of just like the stuff that we can't fully account for in our military's like arsenal it's it's a tiny fraction of that let alone a fraction of like our our defense department's total assets and it also this gets back to when people talk about like corruption in uk, and by God, Ukraine has a history of government corruption, which is part of what the revolution in 2014 was about, right. But it's particularly silly to complain about that as a reason not to send them weaponry, when we know the US Defense Department is massively corrupt,

a huge amount of corruption corruption involving not just like not specifically even like military officials, but involving civilian contractors, involving like the agencies we contract to, involving the money that we've sent over the course of like the $8 trillion or so that we've spent on the war on terror. A huge chunk of that hundreds of billions of dollars of the money that we spent on the war on terror is just gone. Billions of it disappeared in the form of cash pallets that we just lost, right? Like this is the amount of money that it has cost us to support Ukraine in this war is a rounding error of the shit we lost just as a matter of business, like just just as like a

normal thing. It's like a rounding error of like what we gave to Halliburton. Yes, yes. To build hospitals that didn't work in Afghanistan. Yeah, exactly. And speaking of Afghanistan, I think a lot of people look at you, they look at the Afghanistan withdrawal and they think, oh, this is what Ukraine is going to be like. But I think that brings up the point of sort of what are we getting for that 5% of the defense budget? You know, we gave a bunch to Afghan and we ended up getting the same situation that we had when we went in there in 2001. The Taliban in control, but now they have billions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art American military equipment. And hundreds of thousands of Afghan people died in the interim. Exactly.

And then you contrast that with like, well, what does our 5% of military budget get us in Ukraine? And you look at what this is doing to Russia. Russia gained about 0.1% of Ukrainian territory in the year 2023, second year of war. And to do that, they lost about 100,000 soldiers. Now, there's a lot of people in Russia, and that's always been the thing about Russia is that they have this depth of recruiting that they can pull on. But they're taking out recruiting ads in like St. Petersburg and in Moscow and in like the wealthy, that they're going hard on recruiting from wealthy urban centers instead of sort of the traditional rural areas where they bring in all their recruits which which is evidence to me that that they're suffering from a manpower shortage in the same way that ukrainians are yeah and that's one of the things that particularly frustrates me when people say that we're not what are we getting for our money because like that's that's it like russia is on the ropes people just don't want to admit it people see a slight incremental russian gain or they feel like there's a standstill on the Ukrainian counteroffensive and they think, oh, well, let's just throw in the towel. It's like, no, you can't stop the pressure now. And Putin is finally kind of ready to come to the negotiating table, it seems. And the Ukrainians need our help more than ever.

And that's kind of the frustrating aspect. I went on the Hill TV the other day to talk with someone who said, basically, she said, is there any hope for Ukraine? Like, very already fatalistic about the whole thing. Like, are they already on the ropes? And I was like, no, they're not on the ropes. And this is a narrative that we need to change. We need to understand that there's a huge difference between what military aid gets us in ukraine versus what it gets us in israel and afghanistan and there's it's also like a a significant change in like who is being killed

by those weapons right because even when we talk about the use of like the u.s use of weapons uh in in foreign countries we are often talking about these kind of these brush fire conflicts, these insurgencies in which a great deal of the fighting takes place in and around civilian populaces. And obviously, there are Ukrainian cities that have been under siege for quite a while. But when we're talking about like the Ukrainians firing or giving them HIMAR systems or giving them Bradleys, we are talking about weaponry that is being used to break fortifications on along a line of contact um which isn't a zero never is a zero civilian casualty endeavor because those don't exist in war but is a significantly less like involves significantly fewer civilian losses than the kind of wars that we have fought for most of the time

that i've been alive right because we're simply not using the weapons are not being used in the same way. bombarding a trench line is not the same as firing a cruise missile at what you're pretty sure is a terrorist hideout in a city, you know? Right. And we have been reluctant to give them any weapons that could do that. I mean, some notable exceptions would be like the strike on the Naval Command Center in Sevastopol. Yes, some other drone limited, but but honestly, most of those are drone strikes from drone factories where the Ukrainians create their own stuff. And there have been some limited civilian casualties in their incursions into Russian territory because we won't give them any weapons that go into Russian territory. Yeah, they've had to build their own. But we give Israel anything they want.

Yeah. Well, shit. Anything else we want to get into? Israel, anything they want. Yeah. Well, shit. Anything else we want to get into? You know who else gives Israel everything they want? I mean, we can't say that's not the case for whoever comes up next because a number of our advertisements are random. Fair. But hopefully not.

Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement

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Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el te caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and we're back all right one of the things you have to keep in mind when you think about like is what are what is the u.s capable of doing that is positive and what is the u.s capable of doing that's negative is that the united states is fucking massive right our budget is fucking massive and we talk on this show on my other show about a lot of horrible things our government has been involved in which doesn't just which does not detract from the fact that u.s aid and particularly food aid is like a survival matter for tens of millions of

people around the globe right like this is one of those things when the republicans are talking about wanting to like cut all foreign aid that the US gives to basically everyone but Israel. What that means when you talk about that, you are talking about like starving populations of people larger than most major American cities, because the US is massive. And the aid that we give is, you know, usually not, it's not really that significant a chunk of our budget. But for the countries for a lot of countries that receive it, it's like critical to survival food aid and medical aid that we've given over the years. And I think that also gets into like, one of the things that's important about understanding like how what what impact you might have on what's going on in Ukraine, you don't have to, if you have too much of a bad taste in your mouth over the idea of supporting US military aid to anywhere, there's a lot of aid that's not military that's necessary, right? As you do, Charles, people need medicine, right? Like, you are having a positive outcome on like the people in Ukraine, if you are helping to increase

their access to food and medicine and that's not morally complicated it's always there's always some moral complexity in handing out weapons around the world handing out medication is incredibly simple from an ethical standpoint at least from where i'm you're never a bad guy for giving medicine it doesn't even matter who it's to like well you're a bad guy to israel apparently yes yes they will they will drone strike you but i i don't know i think that you like one of the nice things as an american you don't have to realistically the the the fight over ukrainian aid right now um is primarily something that is happening in congress and at this exact moment in that fight, there is very

little that you or I can do. But there is a lot as as you prove, Charles, there is a lot that individual people can do to help other individual people. You may not have access to a HIMARS system or any more Bradley tanks to give the Ukrainians, although if you do, please, please give them over, they'll appreciate them. But there are a number of ways in which you can help like the actual people suffering on the ground. And I think that that's like, that is right now what regular people can actually do. do in terms of the congressional fund because i think that people do i mean i remember from back in my time working adjacent to politics i remember someone told me a statistic where it said it took five phone calls to an office of a congressman for them to rethink their stance on an issue oh interesting i have received texts from aides to congressmen republican and democrat who sit on like house armed services committee or you know defense and that sort of stuff saying like hey what's with this ukraine

like what's your take on the ukraine stuff should we be giving them all this money i don't really support it but you went over there do you think they're using it well and i'm like holy holy crap am i actually getting this text like yes absolutely like, you need you need to do that. You need to green light whatever you need to green light to send that over there. And I think if more people, you know, were, especially now, when a lot of Congress people don't want to engage with the Gaza issue, but are looking for like good wins with their constituencies, like, get to know your local Ukrainian constituency in your area, start a campaign to go to the regional office of your congressman, find out which committees they sit on, and pressure them for sending aid to Ukraine. I mean, that is something you can still raise awareness you can you can connect the decolonial struggle of ukrainians to that of palestinians and other peoples someone who does this extraordinarily well is yulia timoshinka not the ukrainian politician she's a young ukrainian influencer and advocate who went to nyu abu dhabi and sort of got kind of got pilled on the whole palestine thing and has has really eloquently tied the palestinian and ukrainian struggles together um so you can point people towards resources like that uh and let them know that there are at least some people in ukraine who

who see that um who see that connection and then you can also of course you can support humanitarian initiatives in Ukraine very carefully. Please just do so very carefully. I would say there's a lot of people who went over there and started initiatives that were more or less good, but mostly kind of ineffective because they did not actually engage and include Ukrainians in that process. My rule with everything involving ukraine is just like just ask ukrainians about it ask ukrainians what they need figure out what it is their priorities are and make sure that you're including them on your philanthropy and your charity they will understand what is most impactful yeah my organization has experienced a lot of success by being

entirely run by ukrainians and being based in Kharkiv. And as everyone else's funding and resources have dried up, Mission Kharkiv is being handed projects from larger NGOs who are leaving the region because we focus on a local response. It also means that donations to organizations like that go farther because they're going to hire Ukrainians rather than paying for the flights of some Westerner to go back and forth, you know, and do a fundraising, you know, come in from New York and do a fundraising pitch and go back. going towards, this was a commitment I made to myself and my partner when I went over there. My partner at Mission Kharkiv was that I was never going to expense a flight or a meal or anything to Mission Kharkiv. So all that's come out of my own pocket. And that means that every donation that we have gets to go pretty much directly into our programs. So you can still do that as an individual. You can help in that way and and the awareness thing is a

huge part people are forgetting ukrainians feel abandoned like making even just the act of putting a ukrainian flag on your notes or like tweeting about ukraine occasionally is seen as such a huge act of solidarity at this stage in the game that the ukrainians will love you for it and i really love that you bring up the kind of pitfalls of, and this is not, this is Ukraine right now in particular, because it was such a huge international story at the start of the expanded invasion. And that always brings out not just grifters, but also well-meaning people who are going to raise money and try to start initiatives in that country that may not be doing

it in the most cost effective way possible. And I really like what you said about like, the importance of verifying that where you are supporting is not just doing the work, but is like doing the work in the best way possible. And one of like the really important things to look out for is like, well, how much money are they spending on sending Westerners to and from this place, right? It's one thing if like, it's an area that lacks access to medical professionals and they're flying out medical professionals to do like trauma work or whatever. Like there's really like, that's obviously important, but this is something that like a lot of my friends in Iraq and Syria also experienced like the frustration of like NGO

workers staying in nice hotels and driving you know fancy vehicles where there were local organizations doing things like maintaining refugee camps that needed the support and I think that's always really important to try to do your research so that the the support you give the array the awareness you raise and the money that you donate actually goes where it needs to get I think i mean that that opens a whole broad category of maybe this is a subsec essay waiting to happen but i've been playing with this idea of like the idea of conflict vultures these people who sort of descend on a a conflict or a disaster zone for for a variety of reasons you know maybe it's fundraising maybe they work for a big NGO

and this helps get them in the news so they fly themselves out there. Maybe it's a war and they want to be a hero or they want to present themselves as a hero and they end up raising a bunch of money for their equipment and stuff and then stay far away from the fighting line living in nice hotels, like you said.

Or maybe it is, like you said, well-meaning people who just take up air from the people who need it and take up they're like sponges that just absorb all this western energy because they're a they're a relatable face and i've encountered all of those people in ukraine hell i the reason i went to ukraine is because i was like if i'm going to fundraise for this initiative people are going to give more they're going to be more invested if they see an english-speaking american talking to them about this stuff but i came in with the perspective that i can't be

centering myself on this the idea is to deflect onto what the ukrainians are doing and elevate their stories rather than saying i'm here i'm posing with the bakhmut entrance sign i just delivered seven muffins and a generator to like a place that was cleared out by the ukrainians you know six months previously it's more like okay how how do you take americans are very generous people how do you take american philanthropy american dollars american wallets and direct it towards the people who are actually going to change who usually are not americans these large ngos they they serve a purpose the un serves a purpose doctors without borders direct relief you know world central kitchen they do it they do a great job in like a specific thing but a lot of times if you're giving to the united nations or you're giving to the United Nations, or you're giving to

one of these big NGOs that sets up a fundraiser in the immediate aftermath of something, your money is going to remodel an office in Rome, or New York, or Washington, DC. And you're not really reaching the people that you're trying to help. And I think if more Americans understood that, they'd be more responsible with sort of how they spend their money in a philanthropic sense. Yeah. Charles, you have been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and telling us your experience. And yeah, where can people find you on the internet if you want to be found?

I go back and forth. Sometimes I don't want to be found and sometimes I do. But you can find me pretty much everywhere with at Charles McBride. That's McBride with a Y. Except on Twitter, randomly, I don't have that handle. And then I just launched a sub stack, which is, I guess, charlesmcbride.substack.com. And that's where I'll be. I'm kind of shifting towards more long-form content to write about my experiences with these things.

And sort of a more digestible, long form way of people engaging with important issues like this. Oh, and if you're interested in the organization I helped set up in Ukraine, it is mission.harkiv on Instagram or missionharkiv.com. I could put all the info in the description for listeners and everything. But yeah. Sweet. Excellent. Thanks, Charles. Yeah.

Thank you, Charles. You're the best. Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews

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season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose listen to better offline on the iheart radio app apple podcasts wherever else you get your podcasts from