Podcast: Stuck in the Middle with Ukraine

TRANSCRIPT: Stuck in the Middle with Ukraine

Alina Polyakova:

Ukraine is still the wild, wild West. It's still a really ripe market for foreigners who want to make quick money.

Ian Bremmer:

What do a former comedian, an ex-reality TV star, and the son of a former vice president have in common? They're all Biden their time. Sorry, that that was really horrible. But hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. I'm Ian Bremmer, and this is the place where you can hear extended interviews with world leaders, news makers, and experts that I feature on my public television show each week. And today I'm talking about the roots of that terrible joke. That's right, impeachment. The House inquiry is underway, and by now, you've heard a lot about President Donald Trump's phone calls, Joe Biden's son Hunter, and why a Ukrainian TV president turned actual president is at the center of America's political fortunes.

Ian Bremmer:

We're going a little deeper on this episode to help you understand the political climate in Ukraine, and why it's ranked by Ernst and Young as the most corrupt country in the world. They clearly don't get to North Korea at Ernst and Young. We'll also talk about the many high profile Americans who have gotten tangled up in questionable business deals in Ukraine. Many were unethical, some were flat out illegal. My guest today, not only born in Ukraine's capital city of Kyiv, but she's also an expert on that foreboding triangle of Russia, Europe, and the United States. It's Dr. Alina Polyakova. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

We have Alina Polyakova. Wonderful to be with you. Thank you.

Alina Polyakova:

Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

So you're from Ukraine, which means you've been pretty busy of late. I want to start right with the phone call. You obviously saw the transcript, the same, the non-transcript transcript.

Alina Polyakova:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

The same one that we all did. What were your immediate takeaways as you were reading through the summation of the conversation between the Ukrainian President Zelensky and Trump?

Alina Polyakova:

The immediate takeaway from the transcript to my mind is that the US president is clearly trying to get the Ukrainians to do something for him in exchange for US support of Ukraine. And the Ukrainians seem to constantly be trying to drive the conversation towards more diplomatic matters like defense and diplomacy and things like that, yet Trump keeps pulling them back in to want to talk about the investigation into Joe Biden and his son's dealings in Ukraine.

Ian Bremmer:

There was a lot of, "Yes, yes, of course. This is a real problem. We'll look into it." I mean, when you watched that, did you think to yourself, this Ukrainian president, he's under a lot of pressure, the US is a lot bigger, he's going to do anything possible just to make Trump happy?

Alina Polyakova:

Yeah, I felt terrible for Zelensky, the Ukrainian president. As I was reading that conversation, I think I was cringing half the time because the US has a huge amount of leverage over Ukraine. Ukraine is deeply dependent on US diplomatic support, US military support. There's a war they're fighting, an active war against Russia. Russia occupies Crimea. They need US buy-in into this new administration's strategy so they can succeed. And you see Zelensky who is so dependent to establish a personal relationship with Trump, because he knows that's important, just desperately trying to say whatever he can to curry favor with the US president.

Ian Bremmer:

And he wants a meeting?

Alina Polyakova:

Yeah, that's the big question. So Zelensky gets elected in the spring of this year, and the big thing that everybody wants to happen in Ukraine is a state visit to the White House as a show of diplomatic support for Ukraine, for the new president, by the United States. And the Ukrainians really, really want this, and the administration knows they want this, and they're trying to use that as leverage to get the Ukrainians to open these bogus investigations into Joe Biden.

Ian Bremmer:

Trump says the reason that he was giving the Ukrainian president a hard time pressuring him was because Ukraine is massively corrupt, and because the Americans give all the aid, the Europeans aren't doing enough. How accurate are those two claims?

Alina Polyakova:

So point number two, not accurate. The US is the only country providing military support to Ukraine, so that is true. The US provides about 215 million a year to Ukraine military capabilities and capacity, but the European level of support is very high. Over the last six years, Europeans have provided about 15 billion, with a B, to support Ukraine's democratic development, other programs and health issues, et cetera. And so the Europeans have been doing a lot, so has the United States. So that is just a false claim by Trump.

Alina Polyakova:

On point number one about corruption. Yes, there's corruption in Ukraine. In fact, the Ukrainians have fought two revolutions against corruption. One in 2004, and one in 2014, because they were so fed up with corruption. And Ukrainians themselves are frustrated with the situation and they deposed basically two governments because they were so upset with level of corruption. So yes, it's a huge problem. Yes, the United States should pressure the government to do the right thing as the Obama administration did before this administration. But the point is that the president was pushing the Ukrainians not to investigate corruption and get better about weeding out corruption. He was pushing them to look into the specific business dealings of Joe Biden, his top political rival. And those are two very different things.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, when Trump asks specifically, "Are you going to look into Biden," it appeared from the conversation that he had with the Ukrainian president that indeed he agreed he would do that. Was that your takeaway?

Alina Polyakova:

Yeah, so I think when the Ukrainian president Zelensky is confronted by Trump in that phone call, I think he's looking for ways to appease him. He says, "Yes, we'll look into it. I will have my own man appointed soon, so there's a new prosecutor general to investigate these issues." And we actually know that the new prosecutor general in Ukraine is reopening a lot of corruption cases. The Burisma case, that's the company in which Hunter Biden served on the board of, could be one of the cases that they reopened. So he's saying, "Yes, I'm going to get my new guy in there. We're going to look at corruption, Mr. President, we're going to do all that we can." But again, he's trying to steer more towards general corruption versus agreeing that we're going to really focus on Hunter Biden here.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, is this your take as well when the Ukrainian president goes off on the French and the Germans and says that Merkel and Macron are doing nothing for me? Is that really, is that simply appeasing Trump or is there some truth that the Ukrainian president feels like these leaders don't care very much about him?

Alina Polyakova:

That was a cringe-worthy moment when I was reading the transcript as well. I think that was not a good diplomatic move by Zelensky to then basically talk crap about Ukraine's key allies, Germany and France. But then again, I wonder what a phone call between President Macron and President Trump would look like if we got the transcript of that. I imagine every world leader is trying to say anything they can just to curry Trump's favor. "Yes, Mr. President. We'll do anything you want, Mr. President," just to make sure they have a good personal relationship though so that Trump doesn't get set off and then decides to rail against them on Twitter and in various other policy decisions.

Ian Bremmer:

So that's the phone call. We're learning a lot more from a number of people that have been working the Ukraine brief in and around Washington, some of them career diplomats, professionals, bureaucrats, some of them political appointees. What has surprised you? What have you learned since we've started hearing from those around this conversation and around this process?

Alina Polyakova:

So what we've learned over the last few weeks as this whole scandal has been unfolding is that there were professional people as part of this Ukraine-US management mitigation, and there were political appointees, and in various ways they were trying to sort of manage Trump's desires with what is actually appropriate channels. So you have people like Giuliani, who's actually not part of the administration, but is deeply involved in writing a shadow diplomacy on behalf of Trump.

Alina Polyakova:

Then you have the ambassador, the US ambassador to you, Ambassador Sondland, who is a political appointee and seems to be the ring leader in trying to get the Ukrainians to get Trump what he wants, which is some dirt on Biden. And then you have these career professionals like the current chargé in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, he's not an ambassador, he's acting ambassador. And you have the former envoy, Kurt Volker there as well, who's politically appointed, but is a very well known diplomat, many years of experience in the state department elsewhere in the US government. And you see all of these individuals getting very uncomfortable with what the president via Sondland, via Giuliani seemed to be pursuing. And we see this play out in, I think, quite incredible fashion with the publication of all of these text messages between all of these individuals.

Ian Bremmer:

So one group is working for the government, and one is working for the president? Is that what you're saying?

Alina Polyakova:

It's a really strange situation that I think is absolutely unprecedented. Under normal times, diplomacy happens through the State Department. So under normal times, you would have somebody like Kurt Volker who's tasked with managing the Ukraine/US relationship, really leading the way on setting the policy, working with the US ambassador in Kyiv. And there's sort of an alignment of policy. What we have here is you have the president freelancing through all of these proxies like Giuliani, who has no diplomatic official role, and then you have the US ambassador in the EU. Ukraine is not part of the EU. What's the EU ambassador even doing talking about Ukraine? So now you have these conflicting desires, one that seem to be personal desires of the president, and other desires that are much more about the national interest of the United States.

Ian Bremmer:

You have this phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, and basically that's when Nancy Pelosi said, "We're moving on impeachment proceedings." Is everything else just kind of at the edges, or are we actually learning material new information from talking with, expanding the investigation beyond that, because this has the potential, of course, to become massively complicated.

Alina Polyakova:

Well, I think what we're learning, and then this phone call encapsulates how this White House and this president think it's okay to deal in diplomatic affairs. Like I said, it's completely unprecedented. The schism that we see between the professional foreign service officers and diplomats and then these political appointees that are sort of acting in the personal interests of the president, not on the interest of the United States. And so we're learning really the extent of this huge schism that's emerging on the one hand, and we're learning increasingly that Trump wasn't just involved in asking for a quid pro quo from one foreign leader, the Ukrainian leader, we're also learning that he asked other foreign leaders to investigate his political rival. He asked the Chinese to do it. He may have asked the Australians to do it.

Ian Bremmer:

Which he admitted to.

Alina Polyakova:

Exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

Not something we're learning from... He came out and said, "I asked the Chinese leader."

Alina Polyakova:

But it's unlikely he would've admitted this if it wasn't under all of this political pressure. And I think over time, we're going to learn more and more about other individuals close to Trump, close to the White House, who probably have had business interests and business dealings in Ukraine for many, many years that we don't know about. I think we're going to learn a lot more about how this president has, in various ways, tried to extort favors from other political leaders in other countries to get what he wants in our own domestic politics.

Ian Bremmer:

Have you heard anything from any of the Ukrainian leaders around this, any of those close to the president, as this has now come out and become public, and their Ukrainian president is quite exposed in a difficult position? How are they reacting to it? Are they talking about their connections with the Trump administration? What's coming out?

Alina Polyakova:

In Ukraine, what's interesting is that this issue, meaning the impeachment proceedings that began as a result of this phone call between the Ukrainian president and Trump, it's not really the front page news. Now here we have on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, all the major papers are covering this day in and day out. In Ukraine, it's pretty subdued. And I think there's a few reasons for that. I think, one, Ukrainians want to stay out of this whole thing.

Alina Polyakova:

Ukraine has been trying to mind its own business for centuries, and every time they just get pulled into the affairs of other countries, and now they're getting pulled into the affairs of the United States, and they don't want to be involved. I think the Ukrainian president and those around him try to play this the best they could. They're under a huge amount of pressure. The US has a huge amount of leverage over Ukraine, and it's a new president's untested team. There's a lot of amateurs on that team, people with not a lot of experience, yet they have the wherewithal to refuse to do what the Trump people want them to do, which is to, in a very public way, reopen a bogus investigation into Joe Biden and his son, and they refuse to do it.

Ian Bremmer:

Now he said, he came up publicly and said, "I was under no pressure. I felt under no pressure." Again, just smoke, he's just spinning it?

Alina Polyakova:

I feel so terribly for the Ukrainian president, President Zelensky. He's young, he's new, and you have-

Ian Bremmer:

Has no political experience.

Alina Polyakova:

Has no political experience.

Ian Bremmer:

He was a comedian and TV star before he became president.

Alina Polyakova:

Exactly. I think he was hoping to have a very good personal relationship with Trump, because they both come from television. They're not politicians. There's a lot that could produce a good positive personal relationship. And I think that was Zelensky's main task all along. And so we have this press conference from September in which you have Trump, and you have Zelensky sitting next to each other. Zelensky says, "I wasn't pressured. I didn't feel like this was the US president trying to bully me." And again, I think he says that to appease President Trump.

Ian Bremmer:

So on the one hand we have all these Ukrainians that are trying to stay away from this mess. On the other hand, you've got a lot of Americans that have been caught up in it, a lot of political professionals that you know quite well. How are they responding, whether it's the acting ambassador, or it's Kurt Volker, or the people you know, how are they reacting to all of this?

Alina Polyakova:

I think there's a lesson learned here for a lot of people who are professionals, who've been working on foreign policy, national security their entire careers, that if you go into this administration, you're going to get burned. You're going to get thrown under the bus because as soon as the president feels like some trouble might come to him, he'll throw anybody under the bus. Again, so in normal circumstances, you have somebody like Kurt Walker who's a special envoy for Ukraine negotiations-

Ian Bremmer:

Appointed by Trump.

Alina Polyakova:

Appointed by Trump.

Ian Bremmer:

For that position.

Alina Polyakova:

Exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

So he was ready, he's up for it. He is like, "Okay, I'm ready to go and work for Trump."

Alina Polyakova:

And he has for quite some time, actually. He was brought in, still under Tillerson to be the special envoy, and he's lasted this whole time. I think he thought he was doing the right thing, but he just got cut up in all of the shadow diplomacy being run by all of these proxies on Trump's behalf. And I think he was trying to manage it the best he could. But I think the lesson learned, if you want to save your reputation, you cannot work for this administration. Because when push comes to shove, they'll just get rid of you and they'll throw you under the bus.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, on the other side, the non-professionals, Giuliani, in addition to the corruption concerns with those that Trump himself was alleging, you also have Giuliani having worked with and for the Ukrainians for the last 10 years. We have Paul Manafort, who was taking an enormous amount of money for the Ukrainians for all this time when their regime was much more aligned with Moscow. What kind of relationships are these?

Alina Polyakova:

All roads lead back to Ukraine. Manafort is in jail now because of his dealings with a previous Ukrainian administration that was kind of a puppet administration of Moscow. And Giuliani, we're now finding out more and more, has been also taking clients and has various business interests in Ukraine. And I think more of this kind of information is going to keep coming out. And I think that's because Ukraine has a problem with corruption. That's true. Not the most corrupt country in the world, but still. And in many ways, it's easier to get access to money in Ukraine by foreigners. Look at Russia. Russia's very corrupt as well. But that crush has also been kind of consolidated and centralized around Moscow, and around the Kremlin. So it's very, very difficult for foreigners to get a piece of that action. But Ukraine is still the wild, wild west.

Alina Polyakova:

There's still a huge amount of natural resources. The state has never developed in the same way that you have Putin has a lot of control over state resources, and a lot of control of the oligarchs. In Ukraine, not so. It's still a really ripe market for foreigners who want to make quick money, who want to get involved, and they have been able to do so. That's why we're seeing more and more of these cases emerge that people who are close to Trump, have had a lot of dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs, Ukrainian companies, that have made a lot of money out of it.

Ian Bremmer:

So Burisma, there have been probes. Not found to be corrupt, but enormous sums of money being paid to outsiders who have no idea about the sector in Ukraine. What's the difference? Explain the difference between Manafort and Hunter Biden.

Alina Polyakova:

The reason why Manafort is in jail now is because, one, he was getting paid by the former Ukrainian regime, by stolen money, through illicit funds, through corrupt means. He was acting as a foreign agent on behalf of other governments while being involved in US politics at the end of the day. And he didn't disclose any of that information. So somebody like Manafort was out there just looking for the next penny for himself. Companies in this part of the world, not just in Ukraine, elsewhere, who are trying to clean up their act to have a better image in the West, are often hiring and bringing on respected westerners who have a high profile name to serve on their boards. It's a way for them to try to clean up their image, to make themselves look legitimate and clean in the eyes of Western governments and western organizations. So in some ways, I think there are many Hunter Bidens out there, but we just don't know who they are because they don't have such a high profile name, and they're not the son of a former vice president who's running for president now.

Ian Bremmer:

So it's more of an ethical issue as opposed to a legal issue?

Alina Polyakova:

I think so. I think at the end of the day, this is much more a question about Hunter Biden's character, and to what extent he was using his name to try to make some money in a country like Ukraine, and maybe elsewhere as well, versus there being some sort of legal issue here.

Ian Bremmer:

So we haven't talked about the Russian side of things. So here we are, all of this happening between the US and Ukraine, they're calling him Monica Zelensky because he's bringing about another impeachment issue, but we haven't talked about the Russia side. Now there are demonstrations going on in Ukraine opposed to negotiations and the potential for elections coming up in an occupied territory of Ukraine, Southeast Ukraine. Coincidence, I assume, in terms of timing, but how far along are we in terms of actual negotiations between the Russians and the Ukrainians at this point?

Alina Polyakova:

So the Ukrainian president Zelensky, he comes into office, again, without any political experience, and he doesn't have much of a platform he's campaigning over the spring. I mean, his basic platform is that I'm not the other guy. And Ukrainians are so fed up at that point with the incumbent and the time, the guy Petro Poroshenko, that they would've elected anybody that wasn't establishment. And it happens to be that Zelensky is there at the right place at the right time, and then his party now has complete control of the parliament. So he has more power than any other Ukrainian president has ever had since Ukrainian independence. And he has the parliament, and he has his whole new team around him. But a lot of these people don't have much experience. Yet the one thing that he came in saying he really wanted to do was to end the conflict in the Donbas. These are the territories where Russia still waging a war, where there are casualties.

Ian Bremmer:

Their so-called Novorossiya.

Alina Polyakova:

So yeah, the so-called idea that these territories are part of the Russian identity, and it's still conflict going on all the time. It's still casualties on a weekly basis. People are getting killed. So Zelensky comes into office saying, "This is my number one goal is peace." And one of the first things he does is he orchestrates this prisoner exchange between-

Ian Bremmer:

24 prisoners or something, on both sides.

Alina Polyakova:

Yeah, exactly. And that's seen as a positive move.

Ian Bremmer:

Which Americans, the Europeans are not involved. He does it directly with the Russians.

Alina Polyakova:

Exactly. Seen as a positive move. Putin, interestingly, when Zelensky comes into office, doesn't initially call him to congratulate him. Russian television is just spewing all kinds of nasty things about Zelensky when he comes into office. But now, Zelensky seems to be working to actually move the relationship forward. And you mentioned the protests in Kyiv, so what's been happening now. So the Russians have been wanting to have elections, so-called elections, in the occupied territories. Now let's remember, these territories have no government. They're being run by criminals.

Ian Bremmer:

Many of the Ukrainians have left.

Alina Polyakova:

Many of the Ukrainians that could leave have left. They're basically these no man's land areas. Very poor. There's no government.

Ian Bremmer:

Russians control the border.

Alina Polyakova:

Yeah, Russians control the border. There's weapons everywhere. They're really becoming these high criminality zones. And the Russians are saying, "Well, we want elections here that will lead to these regions being autonomous." How can you hold elections in an area where there are weapons, where there is no government, where international observers don't have access to big parts of the territory to be able to claim these elections as free and fair? Yet Zelensky wants to move forward on this. And just recently, his administration said that they will move forward on holding elections in those areas. Nobody knows how they're going to do that. Sometime in the spring. And Ukrainians are really upset about this.

Ian Bremmer:

They feel like he's doing this because he has no choice, because he's naive, because he feels like there is, this is actually a way forward? What do you think is motivating him? Because he started that process before all of this came out with the Americans.

Alina Polyakova:

That's exactly right. So that's been an ongoing agenda of his administration is to end the war in the East. I think he really wants a deal. I think this is something that he and Trump might have in common. They both want to have deals. They want to have big deals to make them look good. And I think he's willing to perhaps sacrifice Ukrainian, the return of those territories to Ukraine, an actual peaceful resolution, in the interest of getting some sort of deal with the Russians. And we still don't know what the details of that deal are. They're very, very murky. But the reality is that you can't hold elections unless the Russians make the first step of removing weapons and removing militants that they control from those areas. And the Russians have not promised to do that.

Ian Bremmer:

So if that's true, we now know there's been lots of back and forth between the Trump advisors and the Ukrainians. We also have this review transcript of the conversation they had directly. Wouldn't the Ukrainian president have said something to Trump, who he knows wants to be buddy-buddy with Putin, "Can you help me out with your buddy Putin? I'm ready to deal." That never came up.

Alina Polyakova:

Yeah, Putin never came up, as far as we know.

Ian Bremmer:

Putin never came up as far as we know.

Alina Polyakova:

Never came up. I think if you're sitting in Moscow and you're Putin, why would you get involved? Everything is playing out so perfectly for you, meaning Ukraine is kind of getting thrown under the bus.

Ian Bremmer:

I don't mean that. I mean If you're the Ukrainian president talking to Trump on the phone, isn't it surprising that literally the president of Russia does not come up once.

Alina Polyakova:

Is this surprising? They assumed it was a personal phone call that would not be released, actually.

Ian Bremmer:

That would not be released.

Alina Polyakova:

What's interesting about that call, as far as we know, based on the transcript that we received, is Trump seems to have one agenda for that call. His agenda is to get the Ukrainians to agree to get dirt on Biden, and he doesn't sway from that agenda at all. And what you get is Zelensky responding, saying, "Yes, Mr. President." And so Russia never comes up as far as we know. Maybe it does, but we're just haven't seen that in the notes that we call the transcript. I don't think it's that surprising because Trump seemed to have just one thing he wanted to get done on this call, which is to get dirt on Biden. And he doesn't need the Russians for that.

Ian Bremmer:

Interesting in that regard that Trump, who they're saying in the mainstream media is always doing lifting for Putin, that when he is on the phone with the Ukrainian president who he has leverage over, he's getting lifting done for Trump. He's not doing any lifting for Putin.

Alina Polyakova:

That's right.

Ian Bremmer:

Not a message. Nothing.

Alina Polyakova:

Yeah, well, in the grand scheme of things, what's happening now with the scenario that Ukraine is so corrupt, the aid that the US government is withholding or putting delays on giving to Ukraine-

Ian Bremmer:

Which they now have. But yes, they delayed it.

Alina Polyakova:

But there've been a lot of delays on that, and there's still questions around if that military support is actually going to Ukraine or not. A lot of questions about it. That's all serving the Russian interest in the long term. So even if Putin didn't come up explicitly on the call, even if Russia didn't come up on the call, in the grand scheme of things, this is all serving the Russian interests in Ukraine incredibly well.

Ian Bremmer:

Where do you think Ukraine goes from here? What's Ukraine going to look like at the end of the Zelensky administration?

Alina Polyakova:

It's a great question. Now we're seeing a lot of unrest in Kyiv, so he may not get that deal on some sort of settlement with Russia and the Donbas after all. I think there have been some good things the Zelensky administration has done. They've pushed through a lot of really unpopular economic reforms. Those are boring things we don't like to talk about, but they have been doing some things on that, healthcare reforms, et cetera. My hope, I like to stay optimistic about Ukraine, is that this administration, Zelensky Administration, will do the right thing. They are under a lot of pressure. They have no excuses. They have the parliament, they have no excuses not to act. They have to reform the economy. They have to move further and further towards democratization. Now, if we have this schism between United States and Ukraine because of President Trump's personal interests around Biden, my concern is that the Russians will think they have a free hand to do whatever they want, and who knows?

Ian Bremmer:

And Ukraine could explode. We've been here before. President Yanukovych wasn't getting the support he needed under massive debt burden from the Europeans, from the Americans. Finally, the Russians say, "I'll throw you some cash," when he goes hat in hand to the Sochi Olympics, "But you got to join the Eurasian Union. You've got to give up on your EU aspirations, associate membership." And then Ukraine blows up because they're so mad that he's doing a deal with the Russians. Are we in danger of that happening again?

Alina Polyakova:

I don't think we're in danger of another Maidan. I think Ukrainians are really tired. I actually think Ukrainians, were genuinely excited about Zelensky. I was in Ukraine shortly after the elections, and I heard a lot of people say, "Democracy is back in this country." It was a free and fair election. It was a landslide for Zelensky. So I think there's genuine support for his agenda to reform Ukraine, to move forward in a rational, reasonable way with Russia.

Alina Polyakova:

The big question for him is what does a deal look like, and can he get popular support on the Donbas? Yanukovych, I think, was only batting for himself. He was playing the EU and Russia against each other, and he wasn't savvy enough to get what he wanted, and he ended up having to run away and leave everything behind. And what we learned is that he was-

Ian Bremmer:

He's in Moscow now.

Alina Polyakova:

No, he's somewhere in Russia. He's hiding out somewhere in Russia. So Yanukovych was only batting for himself at the end of the day, not for the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians figured that out pretty quickly, and that's how we had a revolution in 2013, 2014. I don't think Zelensky being a young guy... He does, I think, have a better sense of popular public opinion. I don't think he will go in that direction. I think if he senses that there could be another revolt, he will back away.

Ian Bremmer:

Alina Polyakova, thank you very much.

Alina Polyakova:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week. Same place, same time, unless you're watching on social media, in which case, it's wherever you happen to be. Don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

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