YouSaid · the spoken record

Skye Fitzgerald

lines on the record: 152
first: 2022-04-20
most recent: 2022-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah. Well, in terms of how to choose which story, Know it's a bit of a mystery potion for me, frankly. I go off and on instinct, but there's also a highly intentional piece of it for me as well. And the intentional piece is Guess I'd call it the Do I Care Threshold, you know, or the so what threshold?”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, right? So, you know, if Putin is put on trial in The Hague at some point, or at least there's the threat of that, right? Now, that's likely never to happen, of course, because someone has to be in custody to go on trial, right? And he's never going to allow that to happen. But just knowing that danger exists is going to change his travel plans in the future, right? MBS, not being able to fly to the US, he's going to feel that and be embarrassed by that. So I think they have a special meaning and consequence in authoritarian regimes because of that.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space anymore. And sanctions, I think, need to be concrete in individual in addition to the larger scope. But when they're concrete in individual, I think often they're felt in a different way.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't doing it in the way I wish you were. He certainly has taken a different stand on Ukraine, you know, and been very vocal. But there's so many instances we could talk about where I feel like the political gamanship, right, often falls into maintaining relationships like with MBS and Saudi Arabia rather than doing the right thing, rather than as a nation, a leader of a nation saying this is unacceptable. We have a higher standard than this. Because I think when leaders do that, it becomes aspirational, right? It becomes aspirational for other leaders in the progressive world at least. And also it rings the alarm bells for other authoritarian leaders and says, you know what, there are lines, right? There are things that can't be done or there will be significant consequences. Like you will not be able to fly into our”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He didn't really make a pariah out of MBS like he said he was going to, right? What if he'd done something else and actually done what he said he was going to do, which was make him, what if he would remove the ability for MBS to fly to the United States, for example? Now that's a sanction, right? That's a sanction that's individual and concrete and would be hugely embarrassing for MBS. That would have been Biden saying, this is unacceptable behavior, right? This is something which because you executed such a horrendous act on someone living in the United States, right, we are not going to give you a stage here at least, right, within the borders of our country. Those are the things that leaders can do that I don't think they do often enough. And certainly our leader right now”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just a guy with a camera. But as a guy with a camera, I've seen a lot of things in a lot of places. And I've seen the effects, these decisions made by authoritarian leaders have on their own citizens. And that's what drives my thinking on this. And that's what drives and motivates me each day to raise the red flag through my films and say Listen. You campaigned for In part on a platform that said that we would regain our prominence on the moral stage of the world, right? And that we would prioritize. Sort of a moral paradigm over relationships with authoritarian regimes, Saudi Arabia being one, right? And yet when the CIA report came out that clearly articulated in detail that MBS was responsible for Khashoggi's murder and for cutting his body into pieces and probably burning it in the backyard of the embassy, what did Biden do?”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The US would have to do is ensure that blockade, now there's a two month ceasefire in place now, but remains lifted beyond the ceasefire and children will stop starving. That's pretty simple. You can trace, it's a direct connection. And we haven't had the sort of the moral wherewithal to make that decision because we're too interested in maintaining positive ties with Saudi Arabia where oil flows from and so much influence. Because Saudi Arabia has so much influence throughout the MENA region, we want to keep that relationship tight despite sort of the moral wounds that come from that.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's incredibly difficult to answer that, right? And I think that's why leaders make the wrong choices so often, right, is they second guess themselves. I think you take all the data at your fingertips, all the intelligence that you have, right? And you look at it all very carefully and you make a decision, right? There are some instances though where it's very clear what's happening, right? And leaders still don't act, right? In Yemen right now, for example, It's very clear what's happening, right? Children are being starved because of a blockade.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All different tools, right? To be used at different moments. But if words fail, if sanctions fail, I think there are moments in history where power is justified, right? And I think Syria was one of them. I think when barrel bombs were dropping on civilian neighborhoods for months and months and months with no intent to do anything other than kill Syrian civilians, that's an instance I think where might is justified to shoot those helicopters out of the sky.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We, the United States, or coalition that we were a part of, yeah, and we didn't do it, and we could have, and I think that's an example where we have the military capability to actually do good in a situation like that, and we don't usually use it for those purposes. And I think that's what a military ought to be used for beyond just defending our borders, is to save others with the privilege that that power affords.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In their neighborhood, over and over and over again, not focused on any military targets, only meant to kill in so fear, right? And early in the conflict, we could have stopped that before Russia got involved. We could have intervened and created a no-fly zone that we”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, military might. Let's take that for one, right? So, um, Have always felt after working in Syrian Turkey that we completely missed our opportunity as a player on the global stage with military capability to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria. We had the ability and we didn't leverage that ability. You know, the fact that I talked with so many Syrians during the course of doing that project who told me their stories of living in their house, right, and having a Syrian helicopter fly over their house and drop a fifty five gallon drum full of explosives and shrapnel.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what are we up to now? 73, 74 million Individuals on this planet now who are displaced, that's a significant bump. I wish that the levers of power. Were used differently in situations like Ukraine and Syria, for example.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first off, I think the conflict is just going to exacerbate The global challenge we have with displacement, the last entire trilogy I did was about displacement to a great extent due to war. And this is a huge displacement of human beings regardless of the cost. And that is going to sort of have a ripple effect across the globe for many, many years to come, regardless of even if the conflict ended today. So there's that that's going to set up a whole nother strain on sort of the global sort of resources that come into play to deal with refugees. You know, there were 79 million displaced people on this globe prior to the Ukrainian conflict, right? You probably know the numbers better than I do in terms of what the current estimates are for displacement from Ukraine.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gallows humor, right? It's a way of, I think, simultaneously acknowledging and allowing yourself to move forward, right? Beyond the pain and the suffering.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. You know, when we went to film Hunger Ward, that was one of the creative questions that I was really concerned about because starvation, you know, it's not a quick action, right? It's a long... Slow, insidious process, right? Just like hunger, right? And yet, when you're hungry, right, it takes you over. It becomes the most important thing, right? It's just absolutely fundamental to life. It's like. Drying breath. And so I really, before I filmed Hunger Word, I struggled to sort of answer how we could creatively approach that because someone sitting in a clinic, starving or being treated for starvation, that's a pretty static scene, right? And what we found was that because of the volume of cases and because of the nature of sort of how quickly people were coming and going is that it was more dynamic than we anticipated.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can see how these famines are being used as weapons in war, and yet we aren't sort of using the levers of power that exist in order to, I think, to call out in important and powerful ways those who are causing them and to make sure that we hold them accountable on the global stage. Now, to some extent, that seems to be happening in Ukraine in a way that hasn't happened for a long time. And that gives me hope, right? And yet I don't believe we've done enough. And I think the international community needs to do far more than we are both in Yemen, in Ethiopia, and in Ukraine right now.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Famine doesn't have to exist, or the bulk of famines on this planet, I believe, don't have to exist, and most of them, or at least a good number of them, are manufactured by the leaders that choose to use feminine as a weapon, right? And Ukraine is one of the obvious examples right now. With siege tactics that are happening in different parts of the country. You know, we built international humanitarian law for a reason, right? Many years ago, and it continues to be written to this day. And it's there to prevent what's happening in Ukraine right now. It's there to prevent what's been happening in Yemen for seven years. And yet there hasn't been any teeth behind it. And that's what disturbs me is that”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's a human being who's able to do that, which is a very difficult thing to do. She still allows herself to be vulnerable. And maybe that's why she can do what she does.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing to watch, and no language is needed, right, to bear witness to this. And she also suffers because of that, right? And so near the end of the film, if you recall, when another child dies and the mother is wailing, we actually cut away to Salha, who's in the hallway, who walks into another room and begins sobbing. She's not a family member, but she has a deep relationship with that family that she forged as soon as they stepped into the ward. So that's universal, right? To see a woman weep. Because a child has died, even if they're not related to that, that's a universal sort of emotion experience we can all relate to. So that's what I mean by... Visual vocabulary.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm thinking about a woman named Salha in the film, who isn't named, but she's, you see her multiple times throughout the film. She's the gatekeeper for the ward, so no one enters that ward. She's literally the gatekeeper at the door. So no one comes in unless Salha allows them to come in, right? But then she also is sort of like... The first point of contact for compassion in the ward. So when mothers and families are admitted, she forms relationships between the moms and the grandmothers, for example, who are admitted and who are living there on the ward. And she does it through hugging. She does it through bringing them food, right? And she forms these really rather quickly deep relationships of compassion with the families. And so”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to think so. I mean, as you noted, you know, there are universals in life that transcend language, right? I mean, suffering is suffering. Love is love. Compassion doesn't take place only through language, right? It's through actions. And so was there a language bearer? Absolutely. Did we try to bridge that through other means and sort of universal emotions and experiences? Absolutely. That's one of the things I always think about when I'm filming is how do we distill down to universals, right? Through imagery, right? Through the vocabulary of cinema, right? Because I believe so deeply that that vocabulary should be visual, right?”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even within a 10 year old girl who's starving. And so you asked what changed me. That's one moment, right? Rather than being crushed by such heavy content, it was actually the opposite where I came away inspired by a 10-year-old girl. And I didn't anticipate that. I didn't think that's what this content would do, but it's what it did. It reinforced for me sort of this incredible capacity we all have as human beings, right? to do good, right, to even within the most difficult of circumstances to choose who we become and what we do. And a 10-year-old girl taught me that or reinforce that for me.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About two and a half weeks, I think, into her treatment, walked into her room and I saw her offering a cap full of water to another younger child who was also starving, right? The shot's actually in the film. And so to see Omea, this child who's starving Giving sustenance to a younger, more vulnerable child who was also starving moved me deeply, right? So I saw her learn from the caregivers around her, right? And as a human being, as a filmmaker, I was incredibly inspired by OMEMA.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when she was admitted, you know, this ten year old girl weighed twenty four pounds, and she could barely stand up. And we started, you know, with the permission of the family to start to document her treatment and to see what would happen with this young girl who is so severely malnourished. And we watched her be treated by the nurses and the doctors in Sadaka Hospital and slowly, over the course of a couple weeks, we saw her change. We saw her start to sort of gain strength and start to recover. And she also watched the caregivers very carefully. And I watched her watch them. Never forget there was a moment where”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every documentary I do changes me in a different way. Like I am not static in that sense, right? And preformed. It's like I change with every project because so many of them are difficult and challenging, right? And so in order to do them, I have to allow myself to change and be changed by them. In the case of Hunger Ward, you may remember the girl Oma, who's the ten-year-old girl who we showcase in Aden in the south of the country. And we were there when she was admitted to the hospital.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, exactly. So that knowledge sort of, it was catalytic in some ways. It sort of moved us forward really wanting to shape the most powerful story we could because we were surrounded by so much suffering every day.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With every bite, absolutely. And so I wouldn't call it guilt. It wasn't exactly guilt, but it was definitely mindfulness, right?”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over a long period of time, children lost the ability to eat normal food and couldn't digest it and just were literally starving and the practitioners were trying to bring them back to a state of thriving. But to leave those clinics and to go to our camp or to go to our hotel and then to have access to food, right? Because we could buy food on the streets and in the hotels I mean It was a very intentional act throughout the course of the shoot to look at a piece of bread right or to look at a bowl of rice and think about that child in the TFC and think about how the privilege of having that bowl of rice that I could eat and digest. So it's certainly every day helped me appreciate right the privilege I had.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a lot of places in the world. Well, that dynamic of sort of like survivors guilt on some level definitely exists. One of the hardest things from Hungerport actually was Eating, right? Because we were in these malnutrition clinics. They're called TFCs, therapeutic feeding centers, where”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've filmed many difficult things over the years. And usually I really love filming. And I didn't love filming Hunker Ward. It was not a process that I enjoyed on any way, shape, or form, sadly, because of the content. Because who wants to watch a child die in front of them? I don't. But I did, and I had to. And when that happened, I felt an incredible responsibility again to go deep, to go deep with that family, to tell the story of this hospital with every sort of ounce of focus and talent that I could bring to the story because people should know that children are dying of starvation right now as we sit here and that that doesn't have to happen and it is happening because of political dynamics. That we can intervene on.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not something I want to film. It's not something that I certainly wanted to happen or seek out, but it happened and the sad truth is that it happens every week at that hospital. And so when it happened in this instance, I felt an incredible responsibility to do justice to that reality, to acknowledge that a child had just died of starvation related causes. And to find some way if the parents wanted us to, to integrate that into this story we'd bring back to A Western audience. And”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People come from hundreds of kilometers away sometimes for specialty treatment of pediatric malnutrition. And I, one time I saw a child come in and it was a male relative that brought this young girl in. And, you know, just because of sort of the gender dynamics in Yemen, there had to be a parent or a relative there to stay with the child while they're at the clinic and it was a male relative. And so You know what many doctors in that instance would do would just turn them away. And instead, what Makia did is she walked into one of the rooms, talked to one of the other mothers, and convinced them to become the temporary guardian, essentially, of this child until a female relative could arrive. So, you know, she's flexible. She finds solutions rather than allowing the problems to deter solutions.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to overcome sort of, I think that danger of psychic numbing, which can happen when you think about suffering on such a large scale, as a filmmaker, as a human being, I have to focus in on the individuals, on those human beings in front of me. And I think that's exactly what Dr. El Sadiq and Makia do to keep going each day. And one of the amazing things about these two healthcare providers that we showcase in the film is that they treat anyone who shows up, right? They don't have to have money. They don't have to have any resources. They just have to get to the clinic or the hospital. And it's incredibly moving to see sort of the flexibility of their thinking in terms of how they make that work. Makia, for example, I saw her in the north of the country. It's an incredibly rural clinic that she works at. So it's like a magnet for all the cases in the north of the country.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speaking just as a human being, I think the scale of suffering is so great in Yemen that I think I'd be overwhelmed, right, if I focused on that scale. You know, you've probably heard that a child dies every 75 seconds in Yemen from hunger, right? So we've been sitting here how long? 35 minutes or so. That's a good handful of children that have already passed away.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another is Dr. Aida Al Sadiq, who's a pediatrician in the south of the country, and so we chose to tell the story sort of through their experiences as caregivers, devoting their lives to try to save this entire cohort, this entire generation of children that has been born into starvation. And that's an incredible, difficult task, but equally inspirational to watch these human beings devote every minute of every day to save a child. I mean, in my view, nothing is more important than that action.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People a lot of times will ask me if they've seen Hunger Ward, you know. That's where the hope is right. You read the byline earlier, the last hope. What I try to focus on in many of my films, including Hunger Ward, is in the very difficult context of war, as the case is in Hunger Ward, in Yemen. I look for hope and I look for inspiration and I do that through people who are doing incredible things under the most difficult circumstances. So when I set out to do a film about starvation in Yemen, just listen to that statement. Where's the hope there, right? And yet what I found, what I discovered were human beings that we could tell the story through who are incredible, inspirational human beings doing amazing things every day. One of those is Makia Maji, a nurse practitioner in the north of the country.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This goes back to your black and white statement at the beginning, right? It's like the world as a whole, of course, you know, is every gradation of gray, right? My background is theater, Lex. And so I was trained long before I picked up a camera to inhabit other characters, right? I have two degrees in theater. And so that level of sort of like walking in other people's shoes and trying to understand and empathize with their world view is fundamental to how I live my life and how I do my work. So in the case of those three that I named Asad MBS and Putin, yeah, I can go there and think through how they came to be who they are, right? From afar, right? And after I go through that process, Still don't think there's any way that one can justify what they've done.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, Assad is one in Syria, and that comes out of an earlier project that I did in Syria and Turkey and what I saw Assad as a ruler do to his own people. And Putin would be the third. Those three human beings are murderers on a scale beyond imagining.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I've never met him, and likely will never meet him, hopefully, but he is, I know a lot about him through his actions, sort of in the MENA region, Middle East and North Africa region. And he is one of three, in my view, as an American sitting here in the US, three people in the world that I think has caused such an incredible volume of misery and suffering and murder on this planet that I think. If you weren't around, the world would be a lot better place. And I'm not a violent person by nature, but there are three human beings that I think the world would be better off without.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he seized controls. Control of the country several years ago, even though he on the surface is not the rule of Saudi Arabia, he is. He's the crown prince.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Saudi line is essentially that the Houthis are an illegitimate government and that it's really a proxy role war between Iran who supports the Houthis nominally and the rest of the world. That's the Saudi narrative. The reality is something altogether different. While the Houthis do receive support from Iran, this is a war started by and sustained by ImbS in Saudi Arabia. Muhammad bin So”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By air that the Saudis use continuously to pummel northern Yemen. When I was there, the sheer volume of airstrikes is hard to describe. And we show the result of only one in the film, really. But it's an asymmetrical war. The de facto authorities of the North on Sir Allah, also known as the Houthi rebel group, they don't have an air force, right? They have a drone force, but they don't have an air force. And so from a military standpoint, it's completely asymmetrical. The Saudis really don't commit troops to the ground. They use only proxies to fight on the ground.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I concur with that statement. In the case of sort of the status quo in Yemen right now, it's a completely asymmetrical war. And so the Saudi coalition, which is made up of primarily Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis, United States, France, Britain, supplying weapons, but it's really driven and catalyzed by Saudi Arabia. And it's asymmetrical To a great extent just because of the”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because so few people in the West know anything about the conflict in Yemen nor the US's complicity in it. And so my intent with the project was try to bring it to a larger Western audience as an attempt to intervene and change the political status quo which allows the use of starvation in Yemen to continue.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ungaward is a short documentary that really is an attempt to illustrate the effects of the conflict on Yemen, specifically on civilians. And we document it in both the North and the South of the country because it's a bifurcated country. The South is held by the globally recognized government in the South, which up until last week was run by at least on the surface by President Hadi hold up in Riyadh. He was essentially removed from office last week by most people would agree the Emiratis and the Saudis to put in place a presidential council. So we wanted to show that starvation was happening in very similar fashions, both in the south and the north. And we wanted to do this film.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I watched that child, her name is Sila die in front of me. A seila had no chance for all those things we hope for a child in this world. She never chanced to grow up, she never chanced to discover love, she didn't have a chance to have a career. She was robbed of all of those things because of the insidious nature of hunger that she was born into. She didn't have to die. She was not starving her mother was being starved because of the blockade over the country. Now who instituted that blockade MBS in Saudi Arabia with the reinforcement and sort of tacit approval of the United States, our own government here. And so there are people who are responsible for the starvation of children, and I think we need to hold them accountable. Now, that's incredibly difficult to do. But just because it's difficult doesn't mean it ought not to be done.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For example, let's make it concrete. So when I was, I don't want to jump ahead, but when I was filming Hunger Ward in Yemen. You know, I met. Mother, who when she gave birth, weighed seventy pounds, the mother weighed seventy pounds. And so her Daughter was starved in the womb, right? When she was born, she was born into a world with no breast milk, very little formula, right? So she was starved before birth. She was born into a world where she continued to be starved by a mother who herself was starved.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think on the humanitarian front, we have to be aggressive and attentive and intervene in significant ways. And I think on the political front, we have to hold players accountable for their actions.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me personally, yeah, I think that if you and I sit in here didn't eat for three days. And had to lay our head on the sidewalk for a couple nights. I think we would take hunger and homelessness a lot more seriously. And I think that's, for some reason, that's missing at this moment in history tragically. And I think until we can generate enough empathy, that's immediate for all of us to understand what that means to go hungry. I'm not sure we're going to sort of marshal the global community to solve it.”
2022-04-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #278 – Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source