So tell me a little bit about how you got here.

How did I get here? Oh my goodness.

Um, the snarky answer is on an airplane.

Um, but the... [laughs] No.

Uh, you know, I, I am a, an equally bifurcated person between my left and my right brain, and I happen to be pretty good at quite a few things.

I am quite creative, and I can also be quite analytical.

I, as, as a child, excelled in academics, and, uh, that led me to, you know, your traditional academic-y path.

Intrepid Wendell, where does it come from?

So tell us how those two worlds met and how you got here.

Well, you know, my world has been a little bit omnidirectional, and I started out, I was a young kid.

I was good at quite a few things except basketball.

Was always terrible at basketball, but that's another, that's another story.

And when I was younger, I had these dreams of being a lawyer, being a diplomat, and, uh, representing the United States in diplomacy.

That was a focus of mine.

I got an undergraduate degree in, uh, in international relations, did well there, got into a good law school, did well there, and got into a very fine graduate program, and I was really approaching the conclusion of the education that was going to get me to, to where I wanted to be, which in my, in my young brain was the State Department's Legal Adviser's Office.

Yeah.