Shaun Newman Podcast - #327 - Alex Krainer

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Alex is a Croatian National, Former hedge fund manager, author and a contributing editor at Zero Hedge. We discuss colonialism is pathogenic in nature, following the money & who's shaking the jar? November 5th SNP Presents: QDM & 2's.   Get your tickets here: https://snp.ticketleap.com/snp-presents-qdm--222-minutes Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

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Dat C.A. He's a Croatian National, former hedge fund manager, author, and contributing editor at Zero Hedge. I'm talking about Alex Kraner. So buckle up. Here we go. I'm Alex Kramer, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today.

I'm joined by Alex Kramer. So first off, sir, Thanks for hopping on. Great pleasure to be with you, fun. Now, I was saying to you before we started to the audience, they'll remember Tom Longo. He just was on, oh, I don't even know now. Days seemed to muddle together, but a couple weeks ago, Tom Longo was on, I mean him chatted afterwards, your name came up, reached out, and so that brings me to you.

But for the audience, for myself, I want to start in the simplest form, Alex. Who is Alex? and we'll just see where we jump off from there. Well, Alex is a Croatian national living in Monaco for the last 26 years. I've, let's say that the way my professional life has defined me is I've been an oil trader and then I moved from there to into the hedge fund industry. I managed the number of hedge funds. And then over the last two to three years, I've,

I've exited that industry and I've tried to kind of position myself as a technology solution providers to people like I used to be, you know, to investment managers. And basically, you know, one of the interesting parts of being a hedge fund manager is that you spend a good chunk of every day at work doing research because one of the things that that's part of the job is figuring out how the world really works as opposed to how they taught us in school that it did. And so, you know, that they gave me the luxury of spending a great deal of time researching and researching interesting things and talking to interesting people. And, you know, that eventually led me to write and publish three different books, one of which was on geopolitics, kind of exactly.

the things that we are experiencing today, namely the coming conflict between Russia and the Western world. And that book got banned after about six weeks that it was on sale. And, you know, one thing led to another. I kind of got more active in writing blogs. And a few years ago, I became the contributing editor at Zero Hedge. And last year I started a YouTube channel. So stuff like that. And that's Alex Criner, I guess, in a nutshell.

I feel like for a moron not knowing this, you're an editor at Zero Hedge? Contributing. Like I write stuff and then I publish it on Zero Hedge. Well, I feel like a ton of my eyes. audience will know that. I had no idea, but I certainly know exactly what that is. So when you, when you rattle that off, I'm like, oh, okay, interesting. You said multiple things there that I'm going to pull that and see where it goes. First, I got to know, what did you put in the book that gets it banned? Oh, well, see, here's what happened. I was, I ended up in here in Monaco meeting a guy named

Bill Browder. Okay. Bill Browder is not exactly a household name for most people, but let's say that he's the principal force that lobbied through the so-called Magnitsky Act in the United States in 2012.

And the Magnitsky Act is basically considered to be the opening salvo of the Cold War between the United States and Russia. The second, the second, the second Cold War, right? And so he used to be a manager of the largest foreign owned fund, investment fund in Russia

during the 1990s. And basically in 2005, he was in Monaco, he made a presentation at the local university. I was invited. I thought it was, you know, like I wasn't particularly interesting. it, but as it happened, I went, and I found the presentation extremely fascinating, very well delivered, very interesting. So I thought like, oh, well, you know, this guy Bill Browder, he's an interesting person. And then five years later, in 2010, there was like some kind of an hedge fund event, and there

was a dinner sponsored by the local Harvard alumni organization. they have some kind of an alumina an organization in Monaco and I got invited and there was Bill Browder again pitching his new hedge fund which was no longer in Moscow based hedge fund something else, something called the Hermit that teach global except that he spent the whole time talking about his experience in Russia and how his quote unquote lawyer Serget Magnitsky

was killed in a Russian prison. And I didn't, you know, like, I only knew this story very vaguely. And it wasn't, you know, like, it wasn't anything central to my life. So I kind of felt like, okay, that was interesting. And the difference is that in 2005, he was gung ho in Russia. He was the first person I ever heard speak positively about Vladimir Putin. Okay. I've never heard anybody speak anything positive about Vladimir Putin up until

that point. What I mean is he spoke incredible terms because he was inside there. The way his investment company operated was that they would buy shares in Russian companies, then they would go in there and investigate corruption in that company because they figured that one of the biggest value killers in the Russian stocks was corruption. So they would buy these hugely undervalued stocks of various Russian companies investigate corruption and then give the results of their investigations to financial press like Wall Street Journal Financial Times, Russian financial press and so in that way they would out the corrupt management in the company and what would happen every time is that Vladimir Putin would step in his government and they would clean

clean up. They would clean up, you know, like they would, they would sack the corrupt managers. They would close the loopholes in the laws that made it possible to, to run these corrupt practices and so forth. So what Bill Browder was saying in that presentation is that Vladimir Putin was actually trying to set Russia back to the rule of law and to stomp up. corruption and my preconception was that Vladimir Putin was a was a was an oligarchs puppet and that he was doing what the oligarchs told him to and and there was Bill Browder who was on the ground in Moscow saying that no that's exactly not true in 2010 he changed 180 degrees and he was Russia bed

Vladimir Putin bad so I thought well that's interesting something happened there. And so anyway, that happened. And then five years later, in 2015, my then-wife gave me a book called The Red Notice, ostensibly written by Bill Browder, but I think it was shadow written by Lee Child. And basically that book kind of encapsulates

his story in Russia in the form of a thriller. So it's kind of well-written. And it paints this picture of Russia as a very dark, rusty, horrible place where Bill Browder was this night in a shining armor, fought for human rights and against corruption. and when I read the book I was a little bit taken aback

because it didn't, you know, like, it reads really well, but it didn't quite square with what I thought I understood about that whole saga that Browder was involved with. And then what I did is I went and I was one of the very, very few books in my life that I read twice because I just had this, feeling like you know like when you're walking out of a shop and you kind of feel like you got screwed by it you can't quite you know like you have to you have to go through the bill every

line I had to go reread the book and and there you know like because when something was well written you know like they kind of manipulate you with little emotional stories that you gloss over certain facts they just move you from point to point and the second time around, you know, like you, you pick up details. And at the end, I was like, oh my God, but this whole thing is a fraud. This book is like the whole thing is a big lie. And that's exactly the narrative that Bill Browder had used to push this Magnitsky Act through U.S. Congress in 2012. So the whole abomination of the law was passed on a fraudulent false narrative. And when I say that it's an abomination of the law is because it completely departs with the Western judicial tradition in that you're like you have a, you have something called the due, how do you call it, the due process?

You know, like you can't punish somebody without going through the due process. Well, the Magnitsky Act enables some unknown, unnamed bureaucrat from U.S. Treasury Department. to just simply put people's name on the so-called Magnitsky list, and then they come under the, under U.S. sanctions, which means that any of your U.S. assets get frozen, your bank accounts, you can't get a visa to travel to the United States, and so on and so forth, which, you know, like, it doesn't sound like much, but if you're kind of a certain kind of a professional, you know, like you trade,

you're an investment manager, you have an import, export business, whatever, you might, it might be very, very damaging. You know, it could be very onerous on people. And there's no recourse. You know, like, you can't go and say, like, well, I don't think I belong on that list because I, you know, like, I'm a private person.

I have nothing with infringing on other people's human rights. why am I on that list? Sorry, Alex, just because I'd never heard of the Magnitsky Act. And this is, I just pulled it up quick, so I assume there's a ton of people like me that have never heard of it. And it just says, the Global Magnitsky Act of 2016 authorizes the U.S. government to sanction foreign government officials worldwide who are deemed to be human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban them from entering the U.S.

Does that pretty much encapsulate what? what it's about? Yeah, it does. What you're reading is the Global Magnitsky Act. There was the original Magnitsky Act, which was just for Russian people and companies, passed in 2012. Subsequently, it was passed through in Canada,

in the European Union, I think, in various other countries. And basically, it's an obscure thing that is not meant to be understood by people. But it has really torn up essentially international law and the ability between nations to communicate and cooperate on important issues. And sometimes when you have somebody committing fraud

or crimes in one country, then you have things like the Interpol and, you know, like you have, you want to be able to launch investigations and lawsuits in other countries, which Magnitskyi actually pretty much disabled. And so that's, that whole event was deemed to be the start of the new Cold War between the United States and Russia. So it was very damaging to their relationships. and it comes basically, it's been catalyzed by this one guy called Bill Browder. But obviously, he's not just one guy. There's like a whole network of very powerful people who are behind it,

who are backing him and who are directing him to do what he does. But of course, they stand in the shadows. Anyway, you know, what happened is I read that book and I felt like, my God, this whole thing is a fraud. And actually, if these people have their way, we're going to end up. in World War II, sorry, three. We're going to, this is going to escalate to a hot shooting war. So I thought somebody has to unmasse these people and has to show that this whole thing is a big giant lie. And then I realized that not many people know about this, probably.

And as I was going through a divorce, you know, I kind of needed a sanity project. So I thought, what the hell? I'll write the book. And so, So I just kind of started and I ended up writing the book. And back in those days, it wasn't a problem for me to self-publish on Amazon. Because, you know, this was an obscure subject that I didn't expect that would become like a global bestseller. So I kind of self-published it on Amazon. And then what happened is that a history professor in the United States named Jeremy Kuzmarov picked up the book, read it, and then wrote a review. on Huffington Post.

And the review was taken down within three or four hours. And I know that because somebody, you know, like somebody alerted me to the review. And I felt like, oh, how cool, you know. Look, Mom, I'm in the papers. And then I wanted to show it to somebody else. And it was gone. The review was gone. And then within the week, my book was deleted from Amazon.

And what I found out is that they received the last. letter from a guy named Jonathan Weiner who used to be a policy advisor to John Kerry when he was the Secretary of State and he basically wrote a letter to Amazon

to delete this book and they did and so that's how the book disappeared and it was republished again by a company named Red Pill Press but after five weeks they squashed it again So it was, was bent twice.

And the book's just telling the story of Bill Browder and Russia? No, actually, the story tells the story, the book tells the story of Bill Browder in the first two chapters. But as I got into the story of Bill Browder, you know, there are all these background things, because what Bill Browder was doing in Russia was he was participating in this massive scale plunder of Russian assets, directed by Western capital during the 1990s, you know, because they went there ostensibly to help Russia transition from communism to capitalism. And so all these foreign experts and financiers and investors and bankers and what have you descended on Russia in their thousands. And supposedly to help the, you know, the backwards Russians figure out.

capitalism and market economy. But what was actually going on is that they were just plundering everything from out of Russia. And I mean, you know, like they were buying the most valuable companies of Russian economy. You know, the companies that own the oil resources, the oil reserves, the natural gas reserves, the arable land, the fishing rights. you know, timber, you know, military industries, all kinds of everything.

For cents on the dollar is an exaggeration. Like they would give themselves like a 99% discount and then they take 70% off of that. So they were like, they were just basically stealing it all away. And then they would, you know, take control of those companies and then trade Russian export through

foreign, you know, Cyprus, Switzerland, British Virgin Island-based companies and they would transfer all the profits abroad. So a very conservative estimate is that they stole between $200,600 billion, but a more realistic estimate is closer to a trillion dollars worth of Russian wealth. And so, you know, the Russians,

during the Boris Yelten era in the 1990s, basically the West owned the Russian government in exactly the same way that they owned the Zelensky government today. Zelensky and Ukraine will do whatever the West tells him to do. And this was the case for Russia in the 1990s with Yeltsin. Yeltsin was, he worked two hours a day. He was drunk most of the time. He was just signing whatever they told him to sign. he was able to rule by decree.

And people around him wrote those decrees. And they were like Harvard Institute for International Development, the World Bank, IMF, various consultants of that sort. And so basically the Russians, they saw all this happen. They were helpless to stop it. But let's say that the KGB had hundreds of files on all of this, you know, hundreds of investigations of fraud, of corruption and so forth. And the whole point of Magnitsky Act is to disable any attempt by the Russian states

to file lawsuits in places like London, Washington, New York, Cyprus, and so forth, where they would want to investigate local companies, deposed witnesses, you know, start the whole judicial process that would bring a lot of documents to light to so that we know what happened during the 1990s in Russia. So Magnitsky Act basically crashes all those means of cooperation because if you want to go file a lawsuit in London and they put you on the Magnitsky Act, well, that's it. You know, like you can't do it.

And so, you know, like some... It gives them the Trump card. He just... Yeah, it gives them... Yeah, it gives them. them the ability to squash any, you know, legitimate request for cooperation, for investigation, any lawsuit filing simply by discretion of some anonymous somebody out of U.S. Treasury Department who puts whoever they want on the Magnitsky list without any recourse.

And then, you know, like they can travel, the witnesses can travel, the lawyers can travel, the investigators can travel, and they're all, they're all, you know, like being, on Magnitsky list, there's a presumption that you're somehow bad, that you are, you know, a human rights abuser, stuff like that. So it basically completely undermined any possibility of constructive cooperation on, let's say, on an equal basis between Russia and Western countries, which passed this Magnitsky legislation, and there are many, you know, United States, Canada, European Union, I don't know, maybe, maybe other countries like Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand and so forth, but I'm not 100% sure because once I published that book,

I kind of left the whole case to, you know, to itself. I didn't, you know, I didn't continue paying very close attention to it. Anyway, yeah, so that, you know, like that book, go a band and then that created a little bit of a how do you call it a little bit of a of a of a drama around the whole thing but it also encouraged me to continue writing and publishing and researching and then this whole okay so as i mentioned to to to finish up the book thing the first two the first two chapters of the book are about Bill Browder, almost entirely in his own words, because his book is so full of

red flags, inconsistencies, and lies that you can, you can, like, shoot it down by using nothing more than Bill Browder's own words against himself. The remaining four chapters, the book has six, six chapters. I just went farther and farther into the, into the whole context of those 1990s in Russia and the transition. And then I found that, you know, like all those events actually have a continuation that goes back to the U.S. Civil War. And then I researched the U.S. Civil War where it turns out that it wasn't what we thought at all, you know, it wasn't about the emancipation of slaves.

It was a huge geopolitical event where the British Empire wanted to destroy the United States, partitioned it, and create two smaller client states, which would be rivaled to one another. And that didn't work principally because Russia got involved. So when, you know, like when the Union led by Abraham Lincoln was about to fold, Russian Tsar Alexander the second sent his Baltic fleet to New York and his Pacific Fleet to San Francisco, where they anchored for six months, making it impossible for Britain and France to intervene on the side of the south, which is what they intended to do.

And so that's how the United States survived as a union through the civil war. And all of this, you know, like I live in the United States. I studied in the United States. I studied U.S. history. Alex, I'm racking my brain, and I do not recall ever hearing Russia in any of it. And I'm a history major who also studied some American history and I'm going, yeah, yeah. I don't think I've ever heard that. Yeah, there you go, because it has been purged from the curriculum very deliberately.

And then I even researched like, how the hell was this possible? And I kind of found out how it was purged out of the history curriculum and by who. if you go into like universities and you speak with like history professors like people who who teach history they know about all this but they don't teach it and people who just study history in the United States like a regular curriculum nobody's ever heard of this and I you know like as I lived in the United States for a few years and I and I studied there I know I have a lot of friends in the United States. I even conducted kind of like an informal survey. I would ask people, like, hey, what was the civil war all about? And to the one, they would say like, oh, it was about

the emancipation of slaves. It was about the abolition of slavery. All right, wrong, but whatever. And what was the role, what was, what role did Russia play in U.S. Civil War? And nobody's ever heard of it. But, you know, like, Russia's role in that episode. was so important that it couldn't have been overlooked by chance. It had to be deliberately scrubbed out of the curriculum. And that's actually what happened. So in all you're looking, why would they scrub that? And who would do it?

Okay. Because that is a very, very long game, is it not to play? That's a very long game. And basically, here's what happened. You know, when the United States went independent, it became very prosperous and very powerful. The United States, during the first half of the 19th century, so the 1800 to 1850s, I think it's pretty much agreed that it was the fastest and greatest growth in wealth and prosperity. recorded for any nation in history.

Okay. And the British Empire suddenly found itself threatened because there was this emerging power across the Atlantic that was, that broke free. And that was that threatened to become a rival. And, you know, controlling the maritime trade routes was basically the way the British Empire held control over the global trade. And so basically it was decided to try to, you know, it was simply not possible for Britain to reconquer the United States

and make it their colony again. So what the British do instead, and they do it to this day, is they try to eliminate a rival by breaking it up into smaller political entities that would always be pitied against one another. They do this, you know, like when they left India, they partitioned into India, Pakistan, you know, in Asia, where, you know, maintaining hegemony over Eurasia is by far their most important geopolitical objective. and basically they left the whole of Eurasia divided in always these political entities that are opposed and hostile to each other, you know, like Turkey and Greece, Russian, Ukraine, North Korea, South Korea, India, Pakistan. There's loads of them. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Iran, Iraq.

It's like the whole of Eurasia is like that. And so whenever some power starts to become a little bit too opity, then they start to, you know, provoke military escalation. They act as lenders to both sides. They sell weapons to both sides. And while these countries are exhausting themselves, fighting one another, it's always the Western banks and the Western corporations who go in there and who extract the natural resource wealth and who provide employment for the local population, which basically means that they, you know, like they need local population to extract those resources and package them up and ship them over. So that has been the game of the British Empire since the beginning.

And on the on the American continent The attempt was To partition the United States In through the through the civil war And basically they kind of Cajoled the South To declare independence Because you know

There was this there was this trade dispute Where you know the United States wanted to use its own resources namely cotton primarily to serve their own industries. So Northwest had the textile industries. The South had loads of cotton. And so they wanted to impose export tariffs so that the cotton would be available to the local industries.

And the British didn't much like that. So they said like, hey, you know, like they're limited your, limiting your markets, they're making you less prosperous. They're exploiting you. You should be able to export your cotton to us. And so they began these, you know, there's always this process of secret diplomacy where British intelligence agents and diplomats will go and kind of work and network a certain power structure in their target country to work in their favor.

And their favor has always been to try to arrange the world in small, mutually hostile political entities. But we see that to this day, and that's what the Ukraine war is exactly about. You know, they don't like that Russia and China have emerged as major political power in Eurasia. So they're using Ukraine to try to weaken Russia, to overthrow the Putin government, and to eventually try to partition Russia into at least, but maybe more smaller political entities that they could again, you know, easily manipulate to their advantage.

Man, that's a lot. That was a lot, Alex. Yeah, that's a lot, you know. And it was a lot for me as well because I went through the American educational system and I never knew any of this. And so I thought, I'll put all that in the book because it all, you know, like it all works together. It all makes one whole, one story that is.

consistent with itself that, you know, like, you can't understand what's going on today if you don't understand the broader historical context of it. And I suppose that the same way that this was purged out of the, out of the curriculum in the United States, that's probably the same reason why my book had to be squashed. And so they squashed it. So that's, you know, that's that story. So when you look at it, you said at the start, you thought Putin was a bad guy, you'd never heard a good thing out of, you know, all growing up. Then you meet Bill Browder and he's the first guy to champion. Actually, Putin's trying to put Russia on the right, you know, course. Then he goes a 180. Putin's the worst evil man in the world. Now you start doing research. You find, holy crap, there's this long relationship and it's been scrubbed and everything else. So where do you sit today then? well uh i sit on the same side as i did when i finally understood the whole story and that that is

i'm i'm i have to say i'm on the on the russian side in this in this whole thing and you know that's i'm croatian as i mentioned you know and croatia is in a similar way as you know you could say poland or check republic today we have kind of a general there's a There's a kind of like a general rusophobic culture there. I don't know why, maybe because we're Catholic or for whatever reason. You know, like people kind of always were leaning towards the West and away from the East. You know, like for no particular reason, but there's this like rusophobic culture. So I was never particularly interested in Russia.

it was very easy to me for me to believe that Vladimir Putin was a thug and a corrupt person and an evil man and so forth. And until I met Bill Browder, I earnestly believed that. You know, I guess, you know, like I was the typical unsuspected consumer of Western narratives, you know, as they were presented to us. But then when I started to dig deep into it, I realized that, you know, like this whole, colonial system that we're part of is there's something very bad about it, you know, it's actually extremely pathogenic, meaning that it has systems of incentives built into it that makes our culture very destructive. Okay.

What I mean, what I mean the Western civilization. Like, we have destroyed six major indigenous civilizations in the last 500 years. You know, the three Central and South American civilizations, India, China, Japan. And we've destroyed thousands of minor cultures. kingdoms, tribal societies around the world over these centuries. We've depopulated large swathes of the world to the tune of 90 plus percent.

You know, like there are indigenous cultures that used to exist that no longer exist at all. They've been completely wiped off the map. And we don't really see that because we are not individually evil people. You know, like we don't wake up in the morning and say, like, well, I feel like killing somebody. I feel like doing something really bad.

We just wake up and think, like, how the hell are we going to go and make a living? But the system within which we operate is pathogenic. It does go overseas. It does plunder, conquer, enslave local populations and treat them very. very, very harshly to the point where, you know, like, they're even, they're even wiped out, setting concentration camps, bonded in forced labor, stuff like that.

And it's going on today. You know, we don't see it. We don't, you know, yeah, you see it. You see it on media, but you know, like, so you don't see it. Yeah. What's the answer then? Or is there an answer? Do you have an answer? You know, all your... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There is an answer because, you know, like I, I spend the last 30 years because my interest in all these things also derives, not just from the Bill Browder story, but because I was also involved in the, in the, in the, in the war in Croatia in the 1990s, you know, like I served in the Croatian army during the war. we also kind of like fell upon each other's Croats against Serbs and we went to war and like, you know, I honestly, I never understood how exactly that happened.

I'm, you know, like all these, all these stories that you're told in the media about these centuries old hatreds that, you know, like these people are so irrational and so hateful, they just can't help it and they just got every so often decide to go to war against one another. That's not how it happens, you know, like we were. very culturally, economically, socially intertwined to the point where you didn't know who was Serb, who was Croat, you know, like my parents, my dad is Croat, my mother is Serbia, and obviously they loved each other. They, you know, like they made a family. So it's not, okay, I think that David Attenborough probably gave us one of the best metaphors for how these things happen. And so

here's here's what it is. He said that if you if you take 100 red ends and 100 black ants and you put them into a glass jar and you observe them, you see that nothing happens. The ants just go about their business,

trying to find their way out or whatever. But then if you shake the jar out violently, then they fall on each other and they fight and kill each other. So it's not that the red ants and the black ants inevitably hate each other and will inevitably express aggression against each other is that somebody shook up the jar for a reason and this is what happened i think in yugoslavia that somebody somebody shook up the jar we didn't we didn't

understand it because we were the ants at that jar but you know we went from one day where I genuinely believed that there was no way that there could be a civil war in Yugoslavia. It just felt like an impossibility. And I think that I was, you know, like probably 99.5% of people in that country felt the same. You know, it just felt preposterous. And then the second that the hostilities actually spark and take off, the psychology rapidly changes. and then people, you know, like the society polarizes, people, you know, kind of close ranks behind their political leadership.

And then you have war. And then war becomes the central business of the whole society. And then, you know, like, it has its own inertia and its own momentum. And it just goes. But, you know, the fact remains that somebody shook up the jar. And I kind of sensed that. And I didn't understand it. And one thing that I noticed is that the things I experienced,

on the ground and the things that I read in the newspapers, in the media, were very different. So I very early on realized that media are lying to us. And so I learned to read everything between the lines. And I honestly spent the last 30 years ever since then to try to understand who's shaking up the jar, what are these incentives that make the system pathogenic? why is it that our system is so destructive to every area of the world that it conquers? And I trace those systems, those incentives to the monetary system, to the financial system. That's what's at the very top of the command and control structure that defines the incentives at the bottom of the structure.

And so I think to fix the system, you have to replace the fraudulent monetary system because it's patently fraudulent. You have to replace it with honest money. Where does honest money come from? All I can think of is in my head, and I don't know if this is the right track or the wrong track, but Bitcoin and things like that, I've had different people on talk about that and how it works. and replacing the Fiat world that we currently live in. But when you say honest money, those two things don't normally go together, honest and money. So where does honest money come from? They could.

Let's say you needed a loan. You needed a hundred bucks. And I have a hundred bucks. And you say, Alex, can you lend me a hundred bucks? I'll pay you back 100 or I'll pay you back 110 at the end of the year. and I said, fine, Sean, here's a hundred bucks. I have a hundred bucks. They're mine.

I can lend them to you on terms that you and I agree. But suppose I don't have a hundred bucks and you say, Alex, can you loan me a hundred bucks? But I have a printing press. And I just print that 100 bucks and give it to you. Well, that's not honest money because I'm actually creating purchasing power. At a thin air. Yeah. and I'm lending it to you,

but you have to pay me back with interest, but I never set the amount of interest into circulation. So I put $100 bucks into the circulation by lending it to you, and you have to repay me $110, but those additional $10, they simply don't exist, right? And so the whole thing is upon this scheme, because for you to be able to repay me 110 when 10 actually don't exist, what I do is I give loans to many people. And so you're just going to have to be, you know, creative and aggressive and adventurous.

And you're going to have to turn those hundred bucks into a profitable business, right? otherwise you fail, otherwise you go bankrupt. And that will maybe incentivize you if you can't, if you can't make it in Canada, then maybe you say like, hey, but, you know, like those people across the border, they got them, there's gold there. Why don't I just go and help myself to their gold, you know? Or, you know, like maybe they can grow sugar or tobacco for me. and, you know, I have good weapons, I can make them.

And if they don't agree, I can chalk their sons and daughters' hands to provide them the extra motivation, you know, which is what, like, you know, what was actually done. And so we know that terrible things have been done through this process, but there's probably a lot of terrible things that we don't know. But we just know that six indigenous civilizations, you know, like very, very advanced, sophisticated civilizations were completely destroyed. And we know that many cultures, many tribes that used to exist simply don't exist anymore or they were, you know, like now you have them in small reservations where they languish in poor health and poverty. and they drink alcohol

to pass time and they die young I'm curious I'm curious Alex in all your studies and everything else have you paid much attention to Canada and if you have what are your thoughts from abroad looking at our country well you know

I think that Canada is part of the British Empire and you know on the on the facade it's a democracy but in actual fact, it's a colony of the crown. And, you know, like your prime minister is not actually the head of your government.

The actual power is exercised by... I think the person is called... God, I forget. Counselor General or something like this. Governor General? Governor General. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Governor General is...

is the person who actually holds the actual power and his answerable to the crown in London, not to the Canadian people. And, you know, so is, sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but I'm wondering, you know, I've heard similar bits and pieces about this. And I'm like,

so is the greatest thing monarchy ever created, the greatest idea is the illusion of, of some sense of control from the people, democracy, when in fact they just sit in the back and pull the strings because it's, I mean, you think about it,

when people riot now, they're not running to Buckingham Palace to depose the king, right, or to whatever, to lop off some heads. They're, you know,

in Canada here, we're pissed at Justin Trudeau. We are absolutely adamant that he is the worst man. And listen, folks, he ain't getting any kind words out of my mouth about. them right now but uh in essence it's they get to go about their lives in a day in a way with you know maybe shadow power even though it's so evident but most people look at their prime

minister their voting capabilities all these things and is that maybe one of the the i don't know is it trick i don't know what i don't know what the word i'm looking for alex is but is that in your mind then one of the best waves they've they've given people power to you know how much i'm looking for it's without actually giving it to them? Well, they're giving people the illusion of power. And so, yeah, that's a, that's a deception. And actually the title of my book was grand deception. Because the whole, you know, like, well, if you look at the United States, for example,

because Canada has, you know, like, Canada has largely minded its own business, or at least for the most part over the last few decades, maybe not. so much anymore under Trudeau, but before, the United States, you know, like I've observed, even, you know, I'm 52 years old, so I, what, I paid attention to politics, maybe for 30-some years. But I see that the American people always vote for the anti-war candidate. You know, like the, you know, even George W. Bush was campaigning on no nation building, on a humble foreign policy, on building partnership, blah, blah, blah,

no more nation building. And, you know, like, people voted for him, and then he turned into a big warmonger. And then came Obama after him, same thing, totally anti-war, and totally turned into a warmonger, expanded, you know, from two wars to seven wars or five,

whatever, I don't remember. And so, you know, like, the policies never change. People vote, and then they're stuck with a candidate for four years, and then they reckon we're getting rid of you next election cycle and then they vote for the

other party and then they get the same policies and then they go like well you know like now next time we're going to vote for the other for the other guy and you know like the certain imperial policies never change regardless of who people vote for so the you know like the policy is obviously

decided and defined elsewhere And, you know, people, I think, until now, haven't really discovered this deception because, you know, like for as long as the society was reasonably prosperous, economies were growing, you were doing your stuff, you didn't pay much attention to any of this. You know, now that we've had this pandemic and there's this, you know, never-ending wars constantly going on all around the world. And now people are questioning and now they realize that maybe it's not the foreign enemies that are oppressing us. Maybe it's the enemies at home that are oppressing us because, you know, like all this nonsense

with vaccine passes, with total surveillance, with, you know, like everything that they've tried to do, which has become glaringly obvious over the last two and a half years, clearly indicates that this is not a thing of Muslim terrorists or Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin or, you know, Hugo Chavez or whoever you want to paint as a boogeyman of the day, you know, they come and go, but something is seemingly permanent in our governments. And it's surviving all our attempts to vote them out because you vote them out, the next people who come do the exact same things. maybe, you know, like in slightly different language, slightly different ideology on the surface level.

But you have to observe what the system does and not what it says about itself. And when you observe what it does, it always does the same thing. Well, that's, you know, here in Canada, right? We got Trudeau-N. and then you got Pierre Pollyev is marching for the conservatives now and saying, you know, I mean, it's interesting to watch it. You talk about following politics now

for 30 years of your life. I mean, you're like three, you know? Like I'm so green, let's say. But eager to learn and eager to hear things because I just keep following this. And I'm like, you know, the last two years must be what it's like, like to get in the ring with Mike Tyson because when he delivers that knockout blow in the first

round in the first like 10 seconds like you're like oh man how do I get back up from this except you know we're although we're fighting Mike Tyson in a sense like I got to kind of stumble backwards and sit and think about this for a while and have different people like yourself on Alex who challenge my way of thinking let's say and I go okay so where are we heading then because I think more and more people whether it's the United States and see whether it's Republican or Democrat, you know, they do things and, you know,

like now the wave is pushing back to the Republicans. Everybody's hating on the Democrats. And in Canada, we had the conservatives and the liberals and everything the liberals, and everything the liberals pushed, now it's starting to swing back to the conservatives. But, you know, all I got to do is talk to enough people in Canada and talk about Harper,

who was before Trudeau and realize he signed us into a bunch of the stuff that we're in right now. And so you're like, okay. So where is this all, leading us to them. Okay, so I think that we are, we really are in the West, well, maybe globally, at a crossroads. And we have a choice. Either we go into this dystopia 1984 society of total surveillance, basically a form of enslavement and a future that probably would, probably wouldn't be worth living a life even, or an emancipation of humanity.

I think that's the choice, because, you know, the logic of the system that the bankers have imposed on us. And so when I talk about the bankers, I'm not talking about the, you know, like local community banks and, you know, like savings, you know, savings institutions. I'm talking about the international banking cartel that's centered on the axis, Wall Street City of London, but headquartered in the city of London,

is that they have to gain total control over society and total control of the people. And if they don't get it, then their system implodes. And if their system implodes, we get emancipation. But we have to understand what it is that we're fighting. You know, it's not it's not the liberals. It's not the Democrats. It's not the, you know, like, Democrats think that they're fighting the, the conservatives,

the, you know, the, I'm sorry, Democrats, the liberals things are fighting the conservatives, the conservatives things that are fighting the, the liberals. You know, they keep throwing these divisive issues to keep people distract. and confused. You know, now it's race, now it's gender dysphoria. Now it's white supremacists

who are, you know, the biggest danger. Now it's, you know, like whatever. Terrorists kind of went out of fashion lately, but, you know, they might be brought back. But the real issue is

banker. you know, the people versus the banks. And that's already, you know, like more than 100 years ago, you have a guy named Lord Acton who has a very famous quote, who said that the issue that has, I'm going to mangle this one, but it's an important quote because it's true. The issue that has swept through time over centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is people versus the banks.

And this is where we are because we started talking about the fraudulent monetary system. Basically, these banks based on Fiat money always fail, right? Because they generate a lot of wealth for themselves exactly by creating money. money out of thin air and putting people on the hook to repay it with interest. So, I mean, you don't have to think hard about it. You just have to imagine that you had a printing press at home where you could print up dollars in whatever amount you want and lend it to people and somehow enforce payment with interest.

And there you are growing your wealth enormously. But then when the people, you know, the credit creation cycle at some point levels off. Because, you know, like everybody's built a house. Everybody's, you know, has shelter, gets enough food, you know. At a given level of technology, the society stabilizes. Everybody's sufficiently comfortable. They don't need to work much harder than, you know, like you have, everybody has a car. the buses are running, the streets are safe,

the city is lit, schools are working, museums are there, you know, like at some point there isn't a big leap that will create that much more productivity that everybody will be able to repay their loans with interest. And you know, long-term loans, you know, like a mortgage, means that you basically pay double what you, you know, Like if you borrow half a million bucks, over the life of the loan, you have to repay a million. Right.

And so the productivity levels off, and some people are not going to be able to pay their loan plus interest. And then you're going to have, you know, like when the system stops growing, then mathematically, you're going to have a certain proportion of people. households and firms who are going to be going bankrupt. Okay. And at that point, the system starts to go into this deflationary death spiral, you know, because if people go bankrupt, then the system starts to lose purchasing power. Businesses need to lower the price to sell everything they have, right? If they have to lower the price, they're not as profitable as they thought they were going to be.

And so the whole thing starts to unravel. And inevitably, the system based on this fraudulent money has this run up and then it crashes. It always happens mathematically and inevitably. You know, like the first very well-known case was the case of John Law in France. But what the bankers have done is they have thought up this central bank. central banking system where you have a central bank, which is always there to bail out the bankers if they fail. And the central bank sells debt to the government. So the central bank A is able to print up as much money as they want, and they're always lending money to the government.

So, you know, like, for as long as the government is there, for the long as the government can pick up part of the slack in the economy, then the whole banking system can, you know, survive and carry on for a long time. But all you've done is you've taken the same fragile, doomed system because the, you know, like the seed of doom is baked into the system from the very beginning. All you've done is you've made it bigger,

but it will still fail, all of it. We're seeing it now happen in Great Britain. And we're going to see it in Japan and we're going to see it in Europe. And ultimately we're going to see it in countries like Canada, United States, New Zealand, Australia and every other country. You know, all the fiat currencies failed in the end. And so at that point, you know, when the money system fails, for the people who have control over the system,

for the ultimate beneficiaries of the system, as their system unravels, they need to bring the new one in. So now their plan is to replace the existing currencies with central bank digital currencies. Yeah? Yeah. So they would say like, say like,

okay, the dollar went down the toilet. We're going to give everybody this new digital money but there's going to be some new rules and you're going to have the idea is to make this money programmable

so that they can limit what you can buy, what you can't buy, how much of what you can buy, how much of what you can buy, that they have constantly control over what you do, where you go and so forth. Okay.

So I think so far, nothing I said is too controversial, right? I mean, this is... And I should, Alex keeps looking at me at times, guys, and pausing. And I'm, I'm like trying, like, a tractor beam to focus on you so I can fall along. So I am doing my best to, like, quiet my brain, Alex. Keep speaking, please. Okay. But you're giving me, like, a very quick.

dirty, not history, but kind of enactment of what's going on here. So carry on and bleeds my silence is just trying to focus. Okay, I just wanted to make sure that I, that what I'm saying is clear. It's very clear. I think that a lot of people are paying, I think that a lot of people are paying attention to these things. And so I think that perhaps your is going to know much of what I'm saying and, and agree. Here's where the problem arises is. when you want to box people into a new system that is very restrictive, let's say, you know, like this new digital currency says that you're allowed to have 100 grams of animal protein per week and then you go, you want to buy some eggs and it says like,

no, you exceeded your quota, you can buy some crickets instead. When, you know, like when the system becomes that controlling and that restrictive, what people do, is they just simply gravitate into gray and black markets. You're going to find a neighbor who has chickens and who's going to give you some eggs for a piece of silver, or you're going to fix their motorcycle or whatever. You know, like people are going to exchange. Yeah, go back to a barter system. Well, not necessarily barter system.

You know, like there's a, there's, you know, in these, in these very big, financial crisis, when the whole currency system collapses, people always invent alternative means of exchange. And it's not bartered. They usually come up with alternative currencies. They usually come with whatever. You know, these things are popping up like mushrooms all over the world. You know, like, and they have done.

You know, like when Weimar, Germany had their hyperinflation in 1921, like, like, practically every region in Germany came up with an alternative local system, even like towns and villages had, you know, created their own. So they could so they could exchange because, you know, like the farmers had food they produced. They could sell, but, you know, like the Deutsche Mark, the Reichmark were no good anymore. So people had to kind of invent another way to exchange and they did and they always do. but if that happens then the bankers the people who are in charge now they lose control if you start exchanging with your neighbors and with people in your town and region for bitcoins or for pieces of silver or whatever emerges as a means of exchange then the bankers

lose control, then there's a risk that people will gravitate into another economic system and adopt different types of currencies. And they will not want to let them go because they are convenient. They make them able to procure what they need and to sell products or services that they have. And now suddenly, you know, like, you're free because, you know, like the tax system is not, you know, you can't tax these black markets and the gray markets. you know, like the whole regulatory system, you know, like it escapes the whole system, right? And so in order to avoid losing control of the societies, they have to come up with these extremely, extremely draconian dystopian systems of control where they want to shut us into these, quote unquote, smart cities, right?

where whether through your smart device or through a chip that they implant or whatever means, they know exactly where you are, where you go, who you meet with, they can, you know,

like, if you, what do you think, Alex, um, to the rural person though, who, you know,

where I come from, you know, I can just hear people. in the back of my brain going, you know, like the digital currency. Let's take that for instance. I haven't carried money and however long I use my card for everything. I never, you know, like what's the difference between that and a digital currency? You know, I got the farm out back. If I need something, there's people all around. I don't need to worry about this. This is whatever problem they can deal with it. Because my population that I sit around, we have a real strong

connection to farming, agriculture, you get the point. And I can hear a lot of them going, I don't need to worry about that. What do you say to that? Well,

for most things you don't need to worry about it. And the way we use digital money today is largely overlaps with the way we use ordinary money. You know, like it's the same thing. The only difference, difference is maybe that, you know, like every time you spend with your credit card or your debit card, there's a trace of the exact transaction.

So, you know, like if you're a married man and you spend some money in a, you know, like in some funny nightclub, maybe you don't want that to be known. So you maybe prefer to use cash at that point. But this is still the conventional money that you're using, right? what the central bankers have in mind is programmable currencies so that they can regulate everything

they can say like okay you're not allowed to travel so when you try to buy a train ticket or to go somewhere it says like no you cannot you're staying where you are or when you when you

hop in your car and you want to buy gasoline and you're not in your area, then that's picked up and you don't get your gasoline. I think that's a fantastic point right there, Alex. And I'm going to bring you back to it, just the term you said, it's programmable money. I don't know if, and maybe I've heard that before and I just haven't picked up on it. But to me, that term rate there makes a lot of sense. I've seen the stories come out of different places about not being able to get a train ticket or, you know, for a guy like myself who, talks to all sorts of people that are, shall we say,

mainstream would like nothing more than to not have them talk. I can imagine where this goes for Sean Newman's bank account down the road and how that can affect different things. If that's all that it is in order to get a train ticket, let's say, you have to use what they have. And then if you have to use what they have and they see, oh, no, you've done these things, you can't buy that. There's no way to go to where you want to go anymore,

because they've basically stripped you of that through programmable money. Am I correct in my assumption on that? You are correct in your assumption. But what you would do then is you'd go hitchhiking, you'd go to gray markets, you'd go to black markets, you'd find people who could give you what you need. You'd find ways to do what you need to do. And this is where they, you know, like in order for them to do this,

they have to create this extremely airtight system of control that I really think that it would make George Orwell's 1984 seem like kind of warm and fluffy on the edges. That's a scary thought. I tell you what, if you haven't read 1984, when you do pick up a copy, make sure you got the funniest movie alive after or what have you, whatever makes you smile. Because you were depressed at the end of that book. That is a rough book. It's really well written and not that long. you can breeze through it

but at the end you're left with I feel pretty incredibly terrible at this point yeah but that book was a warning and George Orwell himself he said the future the future of humanity is a boot stomping

on the human face forever because you know like this banking cartel has enormous power an enormous practically unlimited wealth in this society But their means of control and their means of acquiring that wealth is exactly the fraudulent monetary system that they run. And they will do everything to retain control over that system. But the system has come to the end of the road, meaning that, you know, like, we've gone into this early stages of currency collapse.

and it's a thing that we have inflation now in Western Europe, in Canada in the United States usually, you know, like this inflationary episodes, they don't end just like this. You know, they

they all of the economic imbalances have to unravel all the way. So the inflation is going to be with us either for a very long time. like 10 years or so or you might have episode like like Soviet Union in 1990s or a German Weimar

Republic where it suddenly burst like like water through a broken dam and it all unwinds very very rapidly you know within within a year or two either way their money is going to fail and they're going to have to replace it with something. And this is a very, very delicate point in history for them because they risk losing control, because they risk some kind of a genuinely democratic, honest money movement emerging that people embrace. And I think that the people who run the system, who control the system know that this is the end game, because they know that the seeds of doom are based. into the system from the very get-go.

And I think that George Orwell was privy to some of those discussions. And I think that 1984 comes from there. And the fact that he understood that the future of humanity is a boot stomping on human face forever is exactly where we go in this crossroads if we take the wrong turn. But look, look. I think that today we have the internet, we have the ability to connect to each other. As we're doing now, we're having interesting conversations about relevant subjects. We have what no previous generation has had.

And we have the ability to understand the system and to build a better one. I think we have no excuse because if we fail, then the face that's going to be stomp. by a boot forever is going to be our children and their children. And that simply should be not allowed at a price. You know, like, but you know, like it should be at the cost of one's life. One should fight for the emancipation versus the dystopia. Well, I tell you what, this has been, you know, when you talk about the internet, I guess, I would say for the first time in a very long time, and obviously in the Internet's case, ever,

but communication is so key, right? Because when you talk, when I go back through our chat about pitting one part of the population against another, it always starts with a bit of a divide. I'd had a Canadian military man on who was in Croatia and got to witness different parts of whatever happened there, and I certainly don't. But one of the things that stuck in my mind was he was talking about COVID in Canada, it always starts with a divide, putting one part of the population against the other. And we were talking back then about vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, right?

That it was trying to create an enemy. And then I've had lots of people on to talk about just that in itself. But you fast forward and we come back to another pivotal time where communication, is in the hands of the people again, you know? Once upon a time, it was a printing press. And then, I mean, it's just not, I would say that, um, that was probably an easier thing to control, obviously. And then, you know, came the radio.

And once again, easier the control than the internet, certainly. And you just, you see the different iterations. And now we're at an iteration where, uh, me and Alex can sit and have this conversation. And at this point. and believe me, they are trying actively. My YouTube, I just got to go back to Chris Barber, who is one of the convoy leaders of the Freedom Convoy here in Canada. That one episode, poof, YouTube, see you later, right?

So it's not that they aren't trying. There are ways to, and well, I'm going to come back to your book, Alex, or your books. They're actively trying. But the internet is kind of like trying to stop the wind from blowing, if you will, right? You can dry all you want, but I mean, the wind's going to blow and you got to just deal with it. And that's where we're at today is allowing not only myself, but the audience. And this has been an interesting hour and change of filling my brain to almost complete exhaustion. And I mean that in the best possible way. It's, it's, I love having, thoughts really challenge what I think. And you've challenged a lot of what I think in a very calm, I might add, a very just methodical way. This has been a fantastic little chat. And I, I guess I want to, I want to end. I could go on forever. And I can hear the audience. Like,

give them more. Like just, but my, my problem is, is I'm like, I'm at a point right now where I'm like, I'm going to have to go back and listen to the hour again. And then from there, me and Alex can continue the chat because it's almost at a point where I've read 18 chapters and I just I just can't read anymore. Like the brain is just, it's on cloud nine if that makes sense. So I want to slide into the the crude master final question. It's a shout out to Heath and Tracy McDowell, supporters of the podcast since the very beginning. It's, it's simple. Heath said, you know, if you're going to stand behind a cause, then stand behind it absolutely. What's one thing Alex stands behind? Truth. I think truth is.

is, you know, if I have to put it in one word, it will be truth. I think that everything else falls into place. It's the lies that mislead us and is the truth that set us on the right path. And so I think that, okay, I have, you know, a few years ago, I've written a blog post called Tell the Truth even if it leads to your death. And that's probably my favorite article that I ever read, wrote. And here's the sense that I made out of it. And okay, so this thought came to me in a movie.

There's a film called Kingdom of Heaven by Ridley Scott. And if you haven't seen it, it's a very, very good film. It's worth a watch. And in this film, there's a, there's a, French knight who initiates his son into his order. And this is Liam Neeson and his son is Orlando Bloom. And part of the initiation right, Kingdom of Heaven.

Kingdom of Heaven, yeah. He admonitions him. Always tell the truth, even if it leads to your death. And at the time, I thought like, dude, that just, that's impossible. That's just dumb. It doesn't work. You can't live like that. But the thing is that, you know, like that thought never quite left my mind. You know, like, every so often I'd come back to that.

And, you know, like, obviously it was a sticky thought that wouldn't leave my, you know, wouldn't leave me alone. And here's the sense I made out of it. I think that making that commitment could be extremely significant. For example, if we're loose with the truth, we can be loose in our conduct. Say, for example, if I do something bad, I can get out of it by lying about it, right? and if by contrast I commit to telling the truth then I have to think twice about doing the bad thing

that I would have to lie about later and so and if you tell the truth when you have done something that is not on the up so to speak the punishment or the judgment comes immediately but so does the forgiveness for most things I'm not talking about murder. I'm talking about, you know, like just a simple, you know, with kids, something small.

But it's a lie. Yeah, yeah. And I've taken it far enough that I, for example, I never lied to my kids. You know, like, and I see parents do this all the time. You know, like, the kids say like, oh, I want an ice cream. And then the parents say like, oh, no, the store is closed. Because it's easier to say that than to tell them, no, I'm not buying you an ice cream. And then have them insist for the next two hours.

And I said, like, no, I'm not going to do it that way. So I'm just going to tell them, if I don't want to give you an ice cream, I'm not going to buy you an ice cream. And then I just like take the rest of whatever was coming my way. But, you know, guess what? Kids learned that, you know, like kids learned that when I tell them something, I mean it. And then they learned that insisting doesn't bear fruit, doesn't yield results. Yeah. And on the other hand, you know, like my parents, so their grandparents,

parents got caught lying to them because kids are not dumb and so now they don't believe them so when they tell them something you know like rather than going like oh okay i guess that's that then they go like no it is open i still want to go there i still want to go to the store anyway you know like to make the long story short let's say you're married man and you're tempted to you know do something with with the young chick you meet at a bar if you're not if If you do it, you're going to have to lie about it. If you're committed to telling the truth, you're not going to do it. Maybe it'll save your family.

But at a larger level, you know, like if bankers told the truth, they wouldn't run a fraudulent money system. If the statement told the truth, they wouldn't get us in so many wars. They wouldn't be shaking the jar and get us all to fight each other for no good reason, for invented reasons. So, you know, like I, the sense I made out of this whole thing, as I thought about the thing that I heard in Ridley Scott's film, is that if everybody made the commitment to tell the truth,

maybe we wouldn't all be saints, but maybe it would keep us from this dumb habitual lying that allows us to kind of be fast and loose in our conduct because we say like, oh, whatever, you know, I'll just lie about this and I'll get away with it. And what comes to mind for me, A, Kingdom of Heaven is like my father's favorite movie. Like he loves, he loves the part where he slaps him in the face, you know,

and this is so you don't forget it. And, you know, at the end when Orlando Bloom is knighting everybody, well, does making everyone, does making people a knight make them a better fighter? Yes, right? It's in your brain. Anyways, got a lot of time for that movie. When you talk about, tell the truth, I think of Jordan Peterson. and Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life.

He says, tell the truth or at least don't lie. And I think one of the things he did, I'm talking about Jordan Peterson, is he had a self-authoring program, and he talked about a lot. You know, if you want to motivate yourself, write the worst possible outcome, or I think he calls it hell,

you know, what would hell look like, hell on earth? You don't have to go that far, right? Like, just think of a married man, cheating on your wife getting caught and where that leads to. I think that's a very easy way to see where that leads. And then on the flip side, right, where you want to go to. And then allow your bad future to kind of push you towards the good future, if that makes sense. And telling the truth, even though it may get you in a pickle from time to time, it probably keeps you out of the worst possible things, which is habitually lying, right?

because you see that it starts to work and I'll never get caught and blah blah. But when you do, man, the house of cards that you've built just down it goes. Yeah. And it's, yeah, the house of cards crumbles. And it's not only that, but like when you get caught in a lie once, that everything, you've put everything else about yourself in doubt, especially the best part of you. Because people would think like, well, if you lied about this,

there may be all those good things I thought. Maybe that's all a lie. So you like basically, it's like, it's like a fast track to self-defeat. And, you know, like, on the other hand, if you tell the truth, and even if you get yourself through a pickle from time to time, I've noticed that over time it gains your respect from people. And they know they can rely on you. And that makes a lot of things,

move in your favor, it helps you in life in ways that, you know, like you couldn't have anticipated them, but when the juncture happens and then somebody says, no, he's cool, we can proceed with that, changes everything. You can't anticipate it, but, you know, like you're kind of building by being truthful, by being reliable and honest, it builds up a certain capital that, you know, like in ways that are unpredictable, that you couldn't anticipate,

there comes a time when that capital actually cashes in. I'm curious. You speak about that and such a, I'm going to use eloquent, because I agree with everything you just said. And I'm curious now, has that juncture come in your life, Alex, where you've had one of those moments where you couldn't expect it.

And all of a sudden, something just happened and pushed you along a different path or maybe the path you're going on at just a faster rate, if you will. Well, yeah, actually it did in a few ways. But one of the big ones is, well, okay, so this is private. But, you know, like I had the, I went through divorce a few years ago. And my ex-wife, she, you know, she kind of went hard against me, you know, tried to accuse me of violence at home and this and that. And, you know, I ended up in court several times. But how do you call it? She didn't tell the truth.

and some of the untruths that she told could be verified, could be proven as false. And I told the truth consistently, even at times where I might have been able to maybe harm her case by not being truthful. Anyway, in the end, you know, I had consistently favorable. outcomes in these court cases because I felt that the courts were able to discern that my story stood firm and hers was a house of cards. It did help me in some ways in business as well, you know, with, you know, like with business partners who's, you know, simply went ahead and went into projects with me. And I don't mean to, I didn't mean to dig too far into your personal life. I, I appreciate you sharing. I, um, I admire a person who can, who can tell the truth even when it's probably going to go,

you know, in the, in the current light, you're like, well, this ain't going to go all my favor, right? But the, the, the hidden benefit of that is you can't see what it does for you, you know, off in the future. Yeah. And I guess that's. Yeah. why I asked about it because I think a man of your age who is not old by any stretch, I've learned that lesson on here.

You know, I joked once upon a time I joked that 30s was old and now here I said at 30s and I feel young and then I said something along the lines of 58 or something like that's old and let me tell you the listeners fried me for it. So I have this idea when I'm your age. I'll think I'm still 20. But regardless, you're a little further along the path, if you will. And so the reason I asked is I always find it very intriguing when people have lived out ideas and had experiences with it when you can share those experiences so people can understand. I hope I said that right.

Because, you know, some of us are on a different path and haven't experienced what telling the truth all the time actually does, if you will, and others have done it, you know, for a longer period of time and they can share some of their experiences. That's why I dug a little bit more, and I didn't mean to pull in a whole bunch of your personal life. You know, like I also, you know, like I'm also kind of willing to share this because I genuinely feel that, you know, like telling the truth, making the commitment to telling the truth does take at times a little bit of courage. because sometimes it's going to end up being unpleasant to you. But I share those because I would like to encourage people along that path because in the end, in the end, it works out for the best. In the end, you know, like it even helps you shed things that you should shed but you can't let go of.

And then it enables you to get on to things. You know, like some doors close, other doors open. And, you know, like, it's like, it's a strange thing that, I don't know, I always tell people life is full of magic. Just like, go with it. Don't hold on to certainties. Don't especially lie to yourself. And so I do feel that it's worth making that commitment. You know, it's worth trying to live up to it.

And I, you know, like, I don't aspire to be a saint. And I very much appreciate what Jordan Peterson says, at least don't lie, because there are times where I don't feel like telling the truth. But, you know, like, the problem that risks, that generates the risk of falling into a trap of your own making is like when you deliberately deceive. So, you know, like, if you can't tell the truth, well, then shut up and keep, stop to yourself, but don't deceive, you know, to give people the wrong idea deliberately because you think that you can be clever about it. So, you know, like I... It's funny when you say that, I, uh, what comes directly to mind is all through COVID,

I interviewed, you know, doctors, lawyers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I always reminded, I must have done this on, I don't know how many episodes in a row. A, I don't know everything. B, do your own research. Please don't let me. I'm just trying to figure things out for my own brain. And I had people say, you got to stop saying that. But the reason I kept saying it is exactly what you just said there. I didn't want to deceive people because there were people texting me saying exactly that. You're trying to, and I'm like, no, I'm not. And so it stuck with me is, I want to make sure that people understand that you're getting where I'm at. And that is, you know, no different to this conversation.

So people, and by now, I love the audience I have. They certainly will do their own 10 hours of digging into whatever it is that we've talked about today. But what I really try and not do is deceive because that rate there is intent. That's a that's a very good word of a thing to try and stick away from because that that'll corrupt the soul more than anything over time. Yeah. Yeah. And think of this.

If people told the truth, we wouldn't have had the whole pandemic thing. It wouldn't have happened. The whole thing was so full of lies and deception that that, that's, you know, whole thing wouldn't have happened, certainly not in the way that it has. So like, you know, like when you think about how many bad things come off of lies is, it's just mind-boggling. And then you can use your imagination to think of how much better the world would be if people, if people didn't do that. It's a lovely thought to end on. I appreciate you coming on, Alex. And I don't know what the future holds, but I assume that I will be reaching back out and we'll

find a way to have you back on. I'm glad we ended there because I don't know how to explain it to listeners, but sometimes my brain is just like a history lesson. I've, you know, I've sat through four years of history lessons, right? And sometimes a topic is just so engaging, but an hour is enough. And then you need to take a break and actually think on what the hell you just heard, you know? And to me, that's where we hit. And then we changed the subject. And now I'm like, oh, God, I could sit and discuss philosophy for, you know, another three hours. And I'll chuckle up myself because that's, man, for about an hour there, I didn't, I don't know if I said two words.

But I was trying so hard to focus on what you're saying. And I chuckle. Either way, it's been, it's been really enjoyable getting to know, Alex. And I appreciate you giving me some of your time today coming on and talking about a few different things and a bit of a history lesson, if you will. Hey, with great pleasure and thank you for having me. It was fun to join you today.