Andy Weber

And instead, it's fractured society and science over, you know, political discourse, which is absolutely bananas.

Those two people you mentioned, Andy Weber and Colonel Tom Earhart, they have been working in biodefense across multiple administrations.

When you get so high up on the chain of command in terms of trying to defend against a biological weapon or a bio-attack or a lab leak, you lose what I would say are silly politics in this regard.

And you become incredibly focused on preventing extinction-level event from happening.

But it's not unusual.

Close listeners of Statecraft may remember Nazarbayev from our episode with the esteemed Andy Weber, who was on the ground in Kazakhstan before the Soviet Union and was instrumental in getting the weapons-grade uranium that was lying around in warehouses safely out of the country and brokered the Nazarbayev-Clinton system.

deal to make sure the Kazakhs were handsomely repaid for being helpful in securing that uranium.

One great thing about that, which is also a wonderful policy success story, right? Sort of an unusually just sort of like black and white success.