A quick warning.
There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org Saddam say Ali begins each day with a 6am walk around Cairo.
It's the only 30 minutes of his day he gets to himself before emails and meetings and the chaos of his enormously stressful job begins.
His job right now.
He's in charge of getting trucks filled with humanitarian aid into Gaza during the current war.
He does this for a big American nonprofit called Anara that sent aid into Gaza for decades.
But since the war, every day there are bottlenecks and logistical challenges with all the different governments and agencies and militaries and aid groups involved.
I talked to him at the end of a very long day of this, and I don't know, maybe this is a sign of his diplomatic skills.
He seemed so calm, so chill that I couldn't not ask him about it.
Maybe that's just a facade, but it is.
It is.
It is a facade.
It is.
I had to tell you, like I learned the hard way to hold myself together.
I think I'll break down after things ease up, but now I can't.
So I'm just keeping it.
I'm keeping it together.
I talked to Saddam twice just before the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
And then during the ceasefire, the I was interested in talking to him because the stakes of any pause in fighting seemed so high for aid workers like him before the ceasefire, so little humanitarian aid was actually making it into Gaza.