Alex is a former hedge fund manager/commodities trader and author based in Monaco. Born and raised in the socialist regime of former Yugoslavia, under the one-party communist rule, his successful career in investment management took him from his homeland to Venezuela, via Switzerland and eventually Monaco (with a brief spell back home to serve in the last phase of Croatia’s war of independence).
https://alexkrainer.substack.com
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
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Welcome back to the Deling Pod, Alex Cranor.
Thank you, James.
Great pleasure to be with you.
Warm greetings from Monaco to all your viewers and listeners.
You're such an everyman, Alex.
I mean, almost everyone can relate to living in Monaco.
What does it cost?
What's the average house price or rental price in Monaco?
Oh, it's very difficult to say, you know, because there's a very, very wide range, you know.
But let's say that if you compared rent in Monaco to nice areas of London or Paris, it's not that expensive.
In fact, I would say maybe it's cheaper even.
Now, having said that, you can go crazy and you can rent places that cost €80,000 a month.
Yeah.
But you can also find places that cost €2,000 a month.
Like a broom cupboard!
No, no, no, but let's say an okay two-bedroom, no, one-bedroom apartment, you know, like 60 square meters, you can find it between 2,000 and 3,000 euros a month.
And I suppose you've got no taxes, have you?
Is it tax free?
Yeah, there's no taxes.
So personal taxes are zero.
Corporate taxes, it's a funny thing because corporate taxes on the face of it are high.
I'm not sure if they're 25 or 35% either.
But in reality, corporate taxes are paid after dividends uniquely.
So what people do is they, you know, they pillage their own companies and then pay taxes on whatever is left.
And generally, you know, the taxman is, you know, soft.
And you usually negotiate what you're going to pay.
And if you pay something between 2% and 6%, you're okay.
And I think that they're quite happy to get 5% or 6% out of you on your profits, right?
Oh, okay.
So if you pay the taxman 5% or 6% on your profits, they're happy.
You know, the way law stands, you can be abusive.
You know, you can take out all the profits out in dividends and say like, well, you know, there's nothing to pay taxes from.
But they're not stupid.
So, you know, you have to – you give and you get.
And you have to kind of be correct towards them and then they're correct towards you.
It's not a democracy, you see.
No, no.
Well, just remind us how you earn your living that enables you to live in Monaco.
Okay, so when I came to Monaco at first, I came to work in an oil trading company and I worked there as a market analyst.
And then I became the company's group-wide head of risk.
Because there was, you know, there was a company in Monaco that was focused on oil trading, but it was part of the larger Swiss group out of Geneva that was, you know, generally commodities trading group, but real commodities, not papers, not paper derivatives, like we moved real cargos around.
And so I did that for a while and that led me into a, let's call it, technology R&D project where I developed a model to kind of manage the risk of price exposure because our group's biggest risk was exposure to the oil prices.
And so they asked me to figure it out, you know, to come up with something so that we make more money than we lose.
But by the time I came full distance with this project, they were not quite happy with me, because what they had in mind is some kind of a way of making accurate short-term predictions about the imminent market fluctuations.
And I came very quickly to the conclusion that that's impossible.
You cannot predict what's going to happen in the next hour, let alone predicting what's going to happen tomorrow or next week.
What I did instead is I kind of, by looking into it, by researching, by working with my colleagues and my team, we converged on the idea that markets move in trends, and that we should therefore try to follow trends.
Simply, if the trends are up, let's err on the long side.
If the trend is down, let's err on the short side.
And, you know, over a long sequence of time, we should be getting ahead.
And then I also said, look, you know, this is an algorithmic, systematic model.
We developed it around the oil markets, but it can be applied to anything that moves, you know, any time series, whether it's currencies or gold or copper or soybeans, whatever, stock markets, treasuries.
We can trade any of that using this model.
And I said, like, why don't we diversify it into the hedge fund industry?
You know, these people, the owners of the company, they were all geezers who started their business in the 1970s and they were like, well, you know, whatever, that's not our business.
If you feel strongly about it, the door is open and you're welcome to leave.
And I was 33 years old, long on ambition and short on sense.
And so I said, right, I'm out of here.
So I left.
And it took me a while to elbow my way into the hedge fund industry because, you know, when nobody knows you're invisible, it doesn't matter what story you tell people, they're like, yeah, whatever, you know, we've seen ambitious people before.
And it took me a while and then I managed to, I set up my own asset management company.
That was back before the global financial crisis in 2008 when you could do that.
You could be like two guys and a dog in a garage and you could manage an investment management company and a hedge fund.
Today that's impossible.
And so I started like that, you know, and I started trading in 2007.
I had a good track record.
I eventually got absorbed into a larger group.
Unfortunately, that all came to a violent end with the lockdowns.
And since then, I've been doing, you know, basically same, you know, financial industry, investment advisory activity, but on a completely different basis.
So up until today, since 2020, I haven't
Managed any money for any client, but I have advised other investment managers doing, you know, like sort of turnkey portfolio solutions where I would conceive and design a portfolio management process for them and then give them decision support on a daily basis so that they manage
Client assets according to this model.
So that's where I've drawn bulk of my revenue.
And then the rest, you know, I write, I publish a newsletter daily.
I do, you know, it's almost like I have a job and a hobby. - Okay.
And then, you know, the hobby itself has been intruding on my life more and more because my hobby is writing.
And I started writing about Trading, and portfolio management, and risk management, and commodities, and all these things.
But, you know, the world is what it is.
We're like slip-sliding towards World War III, and I have this thing in my head where I think all of this trading stuff is not going to matter much if we end up in a nuclear holocaust, all incinerated.
So that's kind of been drawing me towards writing about these, you know, East-West geopolitical topics.
Yeah.
It's very interesting your last point.
I share your view, because it's obvious that we are being dragged towards World War 3.
Well, I think we've been in World War 3 for a very long time, but it has up to now been a kind of information war, or a disinformation war if you like, rather than a hot war.
But I think that the hot war is what they want.
And do you share my feeling that This isn't a sign whether it's going to be goodies and baddies.
It's a sign whether it's going to be baddies versus baddies.
I don't have a dog in this fight.
No, actually I would push back against that a little bit, James, because I think that the correct context in which to look at these things is exactly what George Soros told us during one of his last speeches at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
And basically what he said is that this is a clash between two systems of governance.
And he characterizes it as open societies versus closed societies, where, you know, open societies are the good guys, the liberal democracies, human rights, blah, blah, all of these things.
And the closed societies are the bad ones, you know, the autocratic regimes, the tyrants and dictators of this world, Russia, China, Iran.
Belarus and so forth and we have to kill them all otherwise nobody will be happy, right?
And he is absolutely correct about the fact that this is a clash between two systems of governance and this same hypothesis has been repeated by numerous other Let's call it public officials in US administration and NATO.
But, you know, this is the way the narrative is being presented to us.
You know, we are the liberal democracy and everything is hunky-dory on our side.
And over there, it's horrible, it's dark, it's rusty, and human life is cheap and the dictators are very, very evil.
But that's not the way things really are.
What we see when we, you know, Tucker Carlson interview and his trip to Russia and his reports from Russia.
I've done my own fact-finding mission in Russia, you know.
I went in 2015 for two weeks by myself and I just kind of plumped myself in the middle of St.
Petersburg and spent the next two weeks wandering about and exploring.
how people live there.
And, you know, guess what?
It's just a normal place.
Nobody's afraid of speaking out.
They have, I would say, arguably more freedom of speech that we do.
People are nice, you know?
They're courteous.
There's a high level of culture there.
The place looks prosperous.
And then also, you know, life is relatively cheap.
I don't know if you saw, Tucker posted A two minute report on eggs.
Shopping, yes.
And you see they get like what they think is $400 worth of groceries and they end up paying $104 for it.
Or $108, I forget what it is.
And I also participated over the last two years in two different Eurasia integration forums, you know, conferences in Azerbaijan and in Uzbekistan.
This black and white technique of baddies versus baddies is actually not correct.
I'll back that up in real terms.
So, you know, if you're going to judge somebody, judge them by their deeds.
And so if we take Vladimir Putin as the chief villain of this world, and you look at what Russia was like in 1999 when he was When he came at the helm.
And today, the transformation has been nothing short of spectacular.
Because in 1999 Russia was an absolute nightmare.
You know, it was one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Their economy was absolutely shot.
Standard of living was awful.
Healthcare system disintegrated.
The whole country practically was in the process of disintegrating, even as a nation.
And he turned that around and then if you look at the way standards of living have improved, the way people report whether they're happy or not happy, whether they think that their country is moving in the right direction or not, All of these statistics and aggregates look very good and particularly what they call misery statistics, right?
Suicides, abortions, alcohol poisonings and murders.
And so these figures were stratospheric when Vladimir Putin came to power.
And today, suicides, murders, alcohol poisonings have come down by 70 or 80 percent.
Abortions have fallen by some, I think, tenfold.
And so, you know, the point is, these are not just statistics.
You know, you look at a chart and you see something going up or going down.
It's like, oh yeah, well, these are like millions of individual human tragedies.
They were happening at staggering rates 24 years ago.
And you know, like a woman after an abortion, statistically she has six-fold risk of committing suicide.
That's a horrible thing.
And so today, all of that has improved.
Life expectancy today in Russia is higher than it has ever been in Russian history.
And so, you know, Vladimir Putin is the president of Russia.
That's his job.
His job is to improve things in Russia.
And by everything you can look at, he's done a spectacular job of it.
Whereas, you know, if you look at the West, the goodies, The standards of living are coming apart.
You see homeless people.
I've never seen a homeless person in Russia, okay?
Not a one.
The West is full of homeless people.
I grew up in the communist world, so I remember up until 1990 what it was like before and what it is like now.
And I can tell you, since we copy-pasted freedom and democracy into our constitution and our laws, Things have deteriorated radically.
It's worse.
So I think that it's a clash between two systems of governance where one is creating like Dickensian kind of, you know, the things that were described by Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair in the United States and a different standard where, you know, countries of Africa, China, India, Russia, People are actually slowly rising out of poverty and towards affluence and life is improving.
And so I think it's not baddies versus baddies.
I think it's actually colonialist imperialist powers versus the whole rest of humanity, including their domestic populations.
Yeah.
Okay.
So look, I'm very sympathetic to a lot of what you say.
And I recognize that Russia, as the The country in the world that has the richest natural resources, I mean, greater than America, greater than China, I mean, it's extraordinary.
And the West has always had its eyes on the prize of Russia.
They've always wanted to do Russia down.
Yes.
This goes back at least to the great game and possibly earlier on to the kind of the trading with Russia.
With Peter the Great and, you know, the first sort of deputations from Elizabeth's court and stuff, you know.
I mean, obviously the West has always sought to grab what it can out of Russia.
I get all that.
I'm 100% with you on what is happening in the West.
I mean it is we used to look at we used to look at San Francisco as the kind of the West's standout shop window of basket caesaree, you know turds in the street more homeless than working people and so on.
What a beautiful city that was.
Isn't it weird?
20 years ago.
It was oh, I remember it was so it was a wonderful place.
Alex, I too am old enough to remember when San Francisco is one of my dream destinations.
And even, you know, even in the bullet era where you had the best, then the best car chase over, up and down those streets.
We all wanted to go there.
We all wanted to try the food and stuff.
And the same could be said of Paris, actually, to a degree.
I mean, Paris was the very type of romance.
It was almost the acme of capitals, wasn't it?
If you didn't think Paris was the best city in the world, there was something wrong with you.
For so long.
And now look at it.
Do you want to go to Paris?
No, no, no, not especially.
And then also, you know, like last year I was in the UK, and I was in Bath, and Bath made me so sad because it's such a beautiful place.
You walk around and it's just spectacular, but it's filthy, and there's homeless people everywhere, and there's stuff that belongs to homeless people, you know, set everywhere.
Bags.
How did it come to this?
I mean, how did we manage to go from From prosperity, development, high level of culture, high levels of education, a good prosperous society, and now look at it.
And now you see these, you know, like if you look at the U.S.
cities, like practically any, you know, the Skid Row, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, you name it, many, many, many U.S.
cities, and you see all these people high on drugs or low on drugs, I don't even know what it is, It makes me profoundly sad because, you know, all these people are somebody's children.
Somebody must have wished them well.
Somebody brought them to this world hoping that they will do well and enjoy life, and they're absolutely destroyed.
And it's not, you know, like, all this nonsense and claptrap about how they're lazy and stupid and entitled, that's not it.
Because, you know, people are people.
If you give them a stable environment and opportunities and a way to You know, a way to pursue their aspirations.
Then they do and they do well.
But the thing is that they don't have those opportunities anymore.
So what?
They end up on the streets and they end up doing drugs because, you know, they're completely desperate.
They're not sure they want to go on living anymore.
And I think that we have to look to ourselves.
We have to fix our own predicaments.
Rather than trying to go abroad slaying dragons and uprooting evil, because there's plenty of it where we are.
Funnily enough, just briefly as a digression, I'm currently rewriting the intro to a book I wrote about the climate change conspiracy called Watermelons.
I'd just written a paragraph where I'd pointed out about how in the West we are encouraged to think of our press as free and outspoken and there's no censorship.
That all happens in places like Commie China and authoritarian Russia, whether it's under Stalin or under Hitler.
And I remember I was going to give an example of the time during this alleged pandemic when you had Canada confiscating the bank, closing down the bank accounts of people supporting the truck protests.
You had Australia building actual concentration camps.
To house people, people who wouldn't take the vaccine and tear-gassing protesters in the streets.
And you looked at, you looked in the foreign pages of the newspapers.
I mean, I looked in the Telegraph, for example, on the comment section for, for trenchant conservative commentators pointing out that the West had fallen and it had become totalitarian tyrannies, but it didn't.
It just said, look at Putin, look at, look at Xi, look at Look at North Korea.
Yeah, James, exactly.
That's the thing, because this has been the theme throughout history, you know, where oligarchies When they push their own people to the limit and the social revolts come to the boiling point, they always scream barbarians at the gates.
Yeah.
And then what happens, you know, like you have an external enemy, they scare the livid daylights out of you that these like Russians or Chinese or Visigoths are going to come and raid your towns and villages and rape your women and kill your children and enslave you and all of that.
And then what happens like people say like, Oh my God, you know, like I'm the man I have to go defend my country.
And what happens is that people in those situations, they close ranks behind their leadership, even if they hate them, and they go to war.
And we just saw this in Ukraine, you know, Ukraine.
You know, it's not like every last Ukrainian is a neo-Nazi.
You know, when the coup happened in Ukraine, the far-right extremist parties got less than 2% of the vote combined.
They were not popular.
In 2019, So that was just five years ago.
Ukrainians swept Vladimir Zelensky into power because he was promising peace with Eastern Ukraine, making Russian language legal again, and normalizing relations with Russia.
So this is what the people wanted.
This is why 73% of them voted for Zelensky.
And then they got the shaft.
And now, five years later, half a million young men in Ukraine have been killed And many more are going to get killed because the distortion is coming from the top.
This democratic, liberal democracy political process has no trouble deceiving people, promising them one thing, delivering exactly the other thing.
What happened in Ukraine should be regarded as a showcase of what can happen on our sides.
And today in Ukraine you have these extremist neo-Nazi thugs going around the streets collecting young men, boys, like 16, 17-year-olds, 60-year-olds, to shove them into the trenches on the Eastern Front.
And they collect, I don't know, something like $300 per head that they deliver to the army.
Do they?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what I heard.
This is not from a reliable source, but this is what I heard.
And I kind of tend to believe it because there's enough desperation that they might be doing it.
And usually, you know, it turns out that usually there is some kind of an incentive process that makes people do such awful things.
Because basically, when you shove them into the trenches in the Eastern Front, that's basically a death sentence.
They're dying by like a thousand a day.
Oh, it's so upsetting.
Did you see that there was a photograph I saw today of these Ukrainian boys, and they were only boys, lined up in military, in them army uniforms, and they all looked so sad.
They were going to be sent off to die.
It reminds me of those of the latter stages of the Second World War when when sort of 14 year olds in Germany were drafted to man the aircraft anti-aircraft batteries when the Volkssturm the old men were sent out to just die against against American Tanks and stuff.
It's yeah, it's barbaric and you're right.
This could soon be happening to the children of Americans of Britain and Western Europe absolutely sorry There was no reason for this to happen and yet this is no no No, there's no reason for this to happen.
And you know like in the same way that Ukrainians were overwhelmingly against war and But they ended up fighting it anyway, and now they're squeezing every last Ukrainian to throw them to the front?
This could happen to us.
It's already started.
The leaderships of Sweden and Poland and Finland and Germany and the UK...
They're all talking about going to war against Russia, and they're all talking about conscription, and so we can start a little bit like this, and you figure, ah yeah, you know, like, I'm 54 years old, I'm not really in danger.
Well, my boys are going to be 18 years old in a few years.
I don't really want somebody collecting $300 per...
Per boy that they collect and shove into Trump, because it could be my boys.
And when you look what happens, when you see in Ukraine these massive graves full of Ukraine flags, as far as the eye can see, thousands upon thousands of graves of young men who were sacrificed For what exactly?
It's kind of hard to work it out.
Is it freedom and democracy?
Is that what they were sacrificed for?
I don't know quite.
But, you know, nevertheless, they're dead now and their parents will never see them again.
And a whole nation was... And you know, like, if we don't push back against this, this exact same machine is going to start sacrificing us.
Because they are after those 75 trillion dollars of Russian resources.
Because, you know, that's collateral.
And our financial systems are dying to turn that collateral into the financial flows that can enrich our financial oligarchy.
This has been going on for 2,000 years, for more than 2,000 years.
And we have no choice, but, you know, Lord Acton, the theme that's swept across the centuries and is going to have to be fought sooner or later is people versus the banks.
That's now.
Yeah, well we'll come to that in a minute.
I just wanted to make a couple more points.
I looked at my wife's newspaper today because obviously I don't read that rubbish myself.
And do you know what today's story was on the front page of the Telegraph?
No.
Apparently US intelligence sources are worried that the Russians might be putting nuclear weapons in space.
And attacking us from space.
I mean, does anyone believe this shit?
Do they?
Is that?
I'm not sure if they're going to be doing nukes.
Maybe they're going to put lasers in space.
Death lasers, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Evil.
James, I don't know whether that report is true or not.
Nukes aren't real, Alex.
I don't believe in nukes, so that's where I am on that one.
Well, I don't know, but let's say, you know, Russia... Okay, so here's where the things went off the rails.
Russia had a nuclear deterrent, yeah?
And the deterrent was that if anybody ever invaded Russia or struck Russia with nuclear weapons, there would be an instant, automatic retaliation strike.
Practically everything.
With already targets determined, you know, whatever, Brussels, Washington, whatever, they have their list of targets.
So that was the deterrent to prevent, to preempt any invasion or attack with nuclear weapons.
Now, when the United States first bailed out of the anti-ballistic treaty in 2002, and then in 2017, no, in 2019, they canceled the intermediate, short intermediate range missile short intermediate range missile treaty, INFT treaty, and
The United States started installing these missile defense sites first in Romania and then in Poland.
And so the whole point of these missiles is that they brought potentially offensive weapons within six, seven minutes from Russia.
And when they started to develop a covert secret project to do the same in Ukraine, meaning Either in the region of Chernobyl or in the region of Kharkov.
Now they're within three minutes from Russia.
Okay, so nuclear weapons from Kharkov or Chernobyl could reach Moscow within less than five minutes, possibly three minutes.
This does not allow Russia enough time to mount a counter-attack.
So, all at once, they have lost their deterrent, right?
And so the danger was that the West launches, through Ukraine, a decapitation strike against Russia, meaning they hit all of their command and control centers, they hit their nuclear weapons facilities, because they know exactly where they are, because with the INF Treaty they had mutual inspections and verifications, so they know exactly where they have to strike.
And that would disable Russia from mounting counter-attack and from mounting a national defense in case there was an actual invasion.
And it's not like they've never been invaded from the West before.
It's happened at least three times, possibly four.
And so if Russians decided to put nukes into space, I would understand why, because they need to have the deterrent, right?
Sure.
And so... By the way... No, I get that.
If it went all weird a moment ago, my internet was... I don't know whether my face disappeared or what, while you were talking, but anyway... Yeah, it did.
It did.
Good, but you carried on manfully, that was good.
I did, so you could hear me?
Yeah, yeah, well, I could hear the, like, I got the middle, I got, you know, I knew what you were saying.
So, let me play devil's advocate here because I'm really in tune.
As I might say, many people watching this are going to feel the same way.
We look at Russia.
From the decaying West and we see that contrary to the predictions of all the economics experts and all the newspapers, the Russian economy has been thriving.
You're absolutely right that the sort of social decay in Russia, well, it's not even socially decaying.
It seems to be actually sort of enjoying a kind of moral revival that sort of Christian values, family values are being restored and they're being completely Horrifically eroded in the in the West so I get all that and people look at look at Putin and they think He's a strong leader and you may may have you know, you may have his problems.
But look he he's proud of Russian history he's He's a hard man, but he but he but he looks after his people.
I get all this I get all this but when Let me let me propose a kind of more complex complicated narrative Um, which is that there are really no good guys in this.
That, and it's not just about, I mean, okay, so you've got Navalny dying today.
I don't, I don't know what, what, how much responsibility Putin bears for that, but I can't imagine his hands are completely clean.
He's not a, he's not a lovable guy, is he?
He's not a, he's not a, he's not, um, I don't know, James, honestly, because I have... You know, five, six years ago, in 2017, I published a book, Grand Deception.
It's about the relationship between Russia and the West.
The book was immediately banned.
Five weeks after it came out, it was banned.
That's a good sign.
And then it was republished a year later, more or less, and it was banned again six weeks after it was published.
So something there rubbed our freedom and democracy-loving establishment to make it disappear.
How did they ban it, before we go on?
Sorry?
How was it banned?
How did they suppress it?
So I self-published on Amazon, right?
And a letter arrived to Amazon from a man named Jonathan Weiner.
Jonathan Weiner is the primordial swamp creature from the deep state.
He was, under Obama administration, he worked as a policy advisor to John Kerry when he was Secretary of State.
That's a good pedigree of slime.
They just wrote a letter to Amazon and Amazon cancelled me, no questions asked.
But part of the research I've done, because I first looked at the...
I looked at the way Russia has transformed under Putin.
So I wrote one chapter is the scorecard of 17 years of his management of Russia.
But, you know, when 2014 happened and there was the coup in Ukraine, the Putin demonization hysteria went into an overdrive.
And you practically cannot find any redeeming story about Putin in the West.
It's all bad.
He's evil.
He's awful.
And so, I kind of thought, like, well, it can't be like that, you know.
He can't not have one redeeming quality to him.
I mean, the Russians like him.
And, you know, Russians, whatever people might think, but they're just like us, you know.
They're normal people.
They're human beings.
And they're a society with certain Christian values, and so if they like and approve of their president, there's got to be something good about him.
And then I went and I started digging a little bit, and I started watching documentaries about him, which are mostly unflattering, but some are flattering.
I watched a lot of his speeches.
I read his articles and op-eds and I also started looking up people who actually knew him personally.
You know, people who worked with him or knew him from school and so forth.
And I have to say that the portrait of the man that emerges From all that research that I did is actually diametrically opposite from the one that is being painted for us by the Western media.
So I know it comes very difficult to believe and it was very difficult for me to believe it as well because I tend to think of politicians as no good people, you know.
Politics and power attracts exactly the wrong kind of people, so it was very easy for me to believe that Vladimir Putin was a hard man, that he was corrupt, that he was... I shouldn't say evil, but maybe unscrupulous in a way.
Actually, I didn't find any evidence of that whatsoever.
In fact, I found a lot of evidence That he is, in fact, not corrupt.
That there isn't a single credible case, I mean, not even any kind of a case, where somebody said, oh yeah, he was taking bribes.
And you know, the evidence about his great wealth, which is estimated anywhere between four and four hundred billion dollars, I looked into that as well.
There's absolutely nothing behind it.
It's people like Bill Browder who is the go-to expert about Putin's corruption and wealth.
And if you look at Bill Browder's narrative when he gets invited to CNBC and elsewhere to testify about Putin's corruption and wealth, He's talking complete nonsense.
It's, it's, I mean, he actually wrote, sorry.
No, I mean, come on.
Yeah, he, you know, he actually wrote.
In his book, Red Notice, how he knows about Putin's wealth, and it's actually an insult to anybody's intelligence, because he said, oh, here's how it happened.
First, he put Mikhail Khodorkovsky in prison, and then all the other oligarchs came to him and said, like, oh, Vladimir, please, how can we make sure not to end up in prison like Mikhail Khodorkovsky?
And then Putin said, 50%, give me 50% of everything you have.
And then in the next sentence, Bill Browder says that, well, it could have been 70% or 30%.
I don't know because I wasn't there.
In other words, the whole construct, he pulled it out of his back end.
Yes.
And there's nothing to it.
And this is the story for which they invite him to all the Western networks to tell them how corrupt Vladimir Putin is.
He doesn't know anything at all.
OK.
Again, I'm with you on Bill Browder.
I think an awful lot Inevitably, anything you read in the mainstream media, anything you hear from designated Western Russian experts, is by definition going to be propaganda.
It's going to be deep state propaganda.
It's going to originate in the deep state.
The people, the people, the Victoria Nuland types who pushed the war in Ukraine, who in fact started the war in Ukraine by provoking Russia until... I'm completely on board with that.
I'm about to make a comparison which I absolutely hate making because I think it's misleading and it's what the West does all the time, the Western media does all the time.
But if you looked at Hitler in the sort of the mid-1930s, You would be able to make the same case that you're now making for Putin.
He is rebuilding the country.
Its sense of national pride has been restored after a period of absolute abject chaos.
He is popular.
He is charismatic.
He is not the figure that he's been represented as being.
And that would be true, as it is with Putin, but what I'm saying is not that Putin's bad qualities have been exaggerated for effect, because I'm sure that is true.
What I'm saying is that these people ultimately are not the ones pulling the strings.
The reason that, for example, Hitler was doing well in the 1930s, it was because international capital, particularly the The banks in the US and of course Montague Norman in the Bank of England who was deeply corrupt and you know part of this kind of part of the war machine.
They were fueling the Nazis in order to create World War 2.
That's what they wanted.
That was the deal.
In the same way, although I'm really sympathetic to loads of you know, and it's great that Tucker's gone out to show us the truth, you know, what purports to be the truth.
Tucker's probably some kind of CIA asset.
There is something going on here whereby this red meat is being sold to people like you and me.
Look at this alternative and we're all going, yeah, wouldn't it be great having this leader?
Yeah, they've got Christian values.
Yeah, they've got family values.
We want some of that.
When actually we're being played every which way because ultimately Putin is still pushing Agenda 2030.
He's still got the same kind of sustainability goals, you know, all those new world order things that are represented by Klaus Schwab and all the people we hate.
He's never said that there wasn't a pandemic.
He's never said it was fake.
Okay, I'll get to that.
Yeah, he was pushing he was pushing that the vaccines as much as anybody Yes, I'm saying on the big picture stuff.
Where is the different?
He's not really our Savior He seems to be from where we are we awake people, but he's not really Okay, so let's go to the vaccine issue because this one I find very fascinating and I you know I was myself very very taken aback by the way, Russia dealt with the pandemic because Okay, so you had Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, who came out and openly said that this is all nonsense, we're not doing this.
Yeah.
You know, so they had some measures, but just barely.
Who would have thought Belarus would be the free place of the world in 1920?
Yes, exactly.
And so, you know, I know that Russian intelligence and Belarus intelligence, they talk, they share the information.
So if Lukashenko knew it, there's no way that Putin didn't know it.
So why did they go along with it so thoroughly and so... They look like any other country.
And I worked it out when they came up with the Sputnik V vaccine.
And I'll explain this to you.
He may have He may have saved us from something much, much worse.
Here's why.
So, when the whole thing started, I was one of those people who thought from day zero that the whole thing was a hoax, right?
Yeah.
I don't know if I'm allowed to say that.
Well, I just did.
You just did.
It's true.
And I thought that what's going to happen is that we're going to have vaccines.
And then after vaccines, they're going to introduce vaccine passports.
And after vaccine passports, they're going to try to use that technology to tack it onto your digital ID, government services, your bank account, your internet, your electricity, everything, right?
And then we would have this thing that we would have to get used to where everything is by permit.
You can spend your money if you're compliant.
You can have internet if you're compliant.
You can have electricity if you're compliant.
And so the reason why they're doing this was obvious.
They wanted to have control over the whole world at individual level.
So they could harass every person individually through their AI algorithms or whatever they had in mind.
Now, it's very clear from their various white papers and statements of people like George Soros and Bill Gates and so forth, that they fully expected to have a monopoly on the vaccines.
So it was Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and I don't know if there's something else, Sanofi, yeah, Sanofi, the French company.
And so they expected that their Western big pharma corporations would have a monopoly on vaccinating 7 billion people in the world.
Now, what that means is that their vaccine certificates would be the requirements for you to get your QR code, your vaccine passport.
And then, you know, that's part of it.
The bigger, more important part of it, that they were planning an electronic and information infrastructure where all of this data would be processed.
So every time you get your QR code scanned, it goes somewhere, it says, go, no go.
You may pass or you may not pass, okay?
Now, if it's all their vaccines and their certificate, they control everything.
Right?
Well, now, the Russians came out first with Sputnik 5.
And they said to all the countries in the world, you can buy Sputnik 5 from us, $10 a dose, or if you want to produce it yourself, we'll give you a license, low cost.
And so many countries in the Global South did that.
What does that mean now?
Well, now that means that either these globalists have to allow the Russians to participate in this global information matrix and they have to allow Sputnik 5 certificates to be legitimate, how do you call it, to allow you to be compliant with this,
Or, they would have to give up control of every nation that adopted Sputnik V. And so, the Russians offered to have Sputnik V approved for the whole world as a legitimate vaccine.
The Western powers rejected it.
So that means that they couldn't allow Russians To be part of the Matrix, right?
And so they had to give up on the whole... The Russians blew up the whole agenda, okay?
Okay.
And I had a confirmation that this was the case.
Well, confirmation, like a corroboration, because I watched an interview with a Russian general, military general, on Russian TV.
And when the interviewer asked him about the Covid, about the pandemic, the guy gave it away.
He said like, oh, no, no, no, you know, like we didn't we didn't look at this as a public health issue.
This was a geopolitical play.
That's how we played it.
And so, yeah, I get that.
And that's fascinating.
OK, two questions.
I'd be more impressed If you could demonstrate to me that all the Sputnik shots were placebos, that there was nothing in them, that it was inert.
I don't think they were.
No, that's the problem.
So that's pretty bad, Alex, because we know about the damage done to people by this death jab.
Yeah, but apparently, James, and I don't know this for sure, but apparently this was a A traditional vector vaccine, it was an mRNA technology, okay?
Now, I say this... You still rushed out shit there, wasn't it?
Oh, well, you know, I am... Sorry, you're talking to an anti-vaxxer, okay?
Yes.
But, you know, if... People in the West are not stupid.
You can't give them a placebo.
You know, there would be people who would verify that this is actually a vaccine.
So you have to go along with the game very seriously if you're going to get a legitimate acceptance, right?
So, you know, that's why Russia had to play this thing completely, do the social distancing and the mask.
They had to follow the World Health Organization, everything, and they had to have a legitimate vaccine, like a real pharmaceutical product, because if it wasn't, When they brought their vaccine to the World Health Organization, they would have said, like, but this is nothing.
This is saline solution.
You're joking, right?
And they would have rejected it right out of hand.
So it had to be like a real vaccine.
Now, these COVID vaccines, there's all kinds of problems.
You know, you're talking to a 100% complete anti-vaxxer, have been for the last 15 years, so I wouldn't inject anything into myself.
Not the Russian, not the Chinese, not any.
But, you know, to play this game, you had to play it for real.
You couldn't come with blanks.
Okay, and you say nobody, did any countries in the world take up Russia on their offer?
Oh yes, many, many.
I don't know how many exactly, but you know, I know that Hungary did, Serbia did, many African countries, South American countries.
I don't unfortunately know exactly how many, but many, many.
You don't know about the relative injury rates?
Yes, I don't know this.
But you know, I did notice that there are very many videos of athletes falling down on the pitch from Russia.
It's mostly been in the West.
What sports do they play in Russia though?
Ice hockey, I suppose.
Well, yeah, you know, football, ice hockey, basketball is big in Russia and I didn't, I don't, I saw one Russian athlete collapse on the pitch.
I don't know if it was in Russia, but you know, it's also true that there are, there were many Russians who went to, um, who went to, to the West, who traveled to the West to, um, To take a Pfizer vaccine, because they thought that Russian vaccine was crap and that the Western stuff is awesome.
And I know some of them personally.
Sorry, I lost you there, Alex.
Ah, okay.
I'm sure you're dripping words of gold.
Where did you lose me?
At what point did I break out?
Well, you were just talking about... I'd asked you whether the countries that had taken the jab and also whether we had any figures on the relative...
Um, damage done, you know, with the Russian vaccine compared with the other one.
So shall I, shall I go over that again?
No, well, probably, um, it's retrieved, your side will be recorded.
That's the thing.
You'll just have pictures of me going.
As I, as I try and, as I, as I try and get my internet back.
So, yeah.
Um, what, can I ask you another question, which is why doesn't, okay.
I mean, I'm tempted by your thesis, obviously, because it's seductive.
But at the same time, I'm thinking all the world leaders are ultimately working for the New World Order.
And for example, what would have been to stop, if he were really the voice of freedom and truth and stuff, what would have been to stop him saying, This... nyet.
This... this whole pandemic is bollocks.
And I'm not playing that game.
It's lies.
It was invented by...
Yes, that's a good question.
And here's how I would answer it, James.
I think that, first of all, they, the Russians, the Chinese, other countries, they knew something was coming up.
Because, you know, the West has been playing these pandemic games since the early 2000s.
You know, we had SARS and MERS and Zika and the bird flu and the swine flu.
And, you know, it's been like every other year there was another scare.
Well, don't forget 1919.
Yeah, I don't know what happened in 1919 because I don't believe what I thought I knew about it, because what I knew about it is back when I believed that history was written truthfully, now I don't anymore.
No, I'm sure that 1918-1919 was a dry run for the exception.
Yeah, it may well have been, yes, absolutely.
Vaccinations killed those people in the hospital.
You know, I'm sure that they knew it was coming.
Well, first of all, if it's real, you know, supposing it's real, like there's really some kind of a pathogen, you can't really be sure.
You can't just say, like, no, no, this is all bullshit, we're not doing it, and then it turns out people start dying.
Then it's all on you.
Then it's all on you.
Do you know what I mean?
No, no, I'm not buying that one.
Come on.
The Russians know that the moon landings were fake, don't they?
I mean, they know loads of stuff.
They know that the whole of the West is a psyop.
Maybe, maybe, but you know, like, we're guessing about We're guessing about their motivations and I kind of have to allow for the possibility that they... Because, you know, Chinese have acted also very strangely with regards to these pandemics and there are definitely people in Chinese leadership and their military who
I really believe that the West is developing biological warfare that can target a certain genotype, that can target a certain ethnicity.
They're genuinely worried about this.
So, I don't know.
Okay, so let's say, we can be agnostic, but let's allow for the possibility that this is true.
But I think that the more important reason why they would play this way is because they have to be credible.
Because the whole world is watching, and regardless of whether the Russians believe it or not, most of the people in the world do believe it.
So most of the people in the world, if you were being reckless, if you were being, you know, unrigorous about this, they might say that, oh, you're putting us all in danger, and this man can't be taken seriously, and Russia is a rogue state, they're gonna cost us all our lives, and so forth.
So I think there's a number of reasons why you would want to play the game in a rigorous way and remain perceived as a serious player, as somebody who has taken this whole thing seriously and who is acting responsibly because we're all in this together, so we have to take care of one another.
Okay, Alex, I can't, I can't remember how far down the rabbit hole you are.
I mean, I suspect that I'm, I'm, you're pretty far down, but I think I'm probably even more, even more cynical than you are.
And I, let me, let me paraphrase a recent piece by my friend, Miri, Miri Finch.
She's got a great sub stack.
I highly recommend it.
I mean, it's really, you know, she takes no prisoners.
But she she made the point about Tucker Carlson and by the way, I love Tucker Carlson.
I find I love his preppiness.
I love the fact that he's so incredibly rich doesn't need to work.
I love I love all that.
I love his I love his expressions his his aghast expression when he's I really can't believe that this person is talking such shit to me.
I love all that.
I thought that I thought the interview with with Putin was a bit a bit boring.
I mean, I you know, I'm not sure I wanted a half-hour history lesson and and yes, but
Be that as it may, I believe that Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Russell Brand, all these figures that are being sold to us as the alternative truth, the truth that the mainstream media dare not show you, they are all part of the deception.
We're being lined up at the moment for the return of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump who has been suppressed by the evil, this corrupt system and he's about to restore justice and it's going to be great.
I think Trump is probably the Antichrist.
I think certainly all these people that are being presented to us as the kind of the alternative hope are Part of the deception, they're going to be the kind of the Luciferian Ying to the Yan of the sort of Satanist Biden, etc.
I think that Putin is part of that false light thing that, yeah, he's sexy, he's virile, I mean, okay, so he may be involved in bumping off people occasionally now and then, he's not perfect, but he's clearly the future.
But if you look at this in terms of Our Dark Overlords, who've been planning this out over centuries, you look at Albert Pike and stuff and his various predictions of, you know, the First World War, the Second World War and the Third World War, that we are being set up for something that's been planned for centuries, which is the replacement of the The Anglosphere hegemony, the Western hegemony, with a new virile East.
But ultimately, we're going to be slaves either way.
You know, we're just going to be slaves of the new system instead of the old system.
And it's being sold to us in a sexy way by a man who poses on horseback with his chest bared.
Okay, so I'll tell you why I don't believe that, and the reason is history.
Because, you know, the banking oligarchies, and it's always been banking oligarchies, you know, since I think about the 6th century BC in Greece, Up until today, it's always been the banking oligarchies.
You know, Venice, the Lombard banking system, all the empires, Spanish Empire was driven by the bankers, the British Empire, the current American quote-unquote empire and so forth.
It's always the banking oligarchies that are on top of the heap of the, you know, command and control hierarchy.
And, you know, they've been very keen on creating this society in which they hold absolute power and everybody else is enslaved and everybody only gets to live by their permission.
And they have always failed.
And there's always been resistance to this.
And resistance often came from the privileged classes.
The resistance wasn't always the poor peasants.
If you go back to history and you have the The Gracchi brothers, and Catiline, and Julius Caesar, they were all from very wealthy patrician families.
Nevertheless, they were not going along with the oligarchy.
And I think that the same is going to be... And anyway, you know, in the end, the oligarchy always tried and always failed.
They've been failing for two thousand years, and they create mayhem, and they create misery in the process, but they always fail.
Their whole construct always crumbles in the end.
And so I don't think we should exclude the possibility that there is genuine resistance, not just controlled opposition, but genuine opposition, and that Trump might be it.
Maybe, maybe not.
I don't know.
Vladimir Putin might be it.
I think the danger of succumbing to these defeatist and doom, how do you call it?
Doomist?
Yeah, doom-mongering, I suppose.
Yeah, doom-mongering beliefs.
I think there's more danger in that than in anything else, because if people embrace these beliefs, then the implication is that all resistance is futile.
And if all resistance is futile, then you know what happens next?
Learned helplessness.
And through learned helplessness, we doom our children.
They're going to be slaves.
We just have to believe in God, believe in humanity, and we have to do our best to make sure that our children don't end up like young Ukrainians, because that's what's coming our way.
And so that's why I would, you know, I would embrace these beliefs if somebody could persuade me with evidence rather than with conjecture and extrapolation and Unprovable.
That's all we've got though.
Come on.
I mean at that level Alex, all you're ever going to get is unprovable.
Conjecture and extrapolation can go two different ways.
Sure.
So, you know, I will embrace the one that makes me want to fight and resist and not comply.
Because the other one is like, what the hell, let's just shoot ourselves all in the face right now, because what's the point?
Listen, I'm always sympathetic to a bit of hopium.
I would have to apply some peer pressure on you.
Have more, have more!
Yeah, I've been quite low on hopium at the moment.
I have been going through, I have to say, especially with some of my last podcast guests.
A bit of revelation, we are really living in end times and only God's going to sort this, which I think actually is probably true.
Yeah, but you know, what do end times mean?
End times never mean the end of life on earth or the end of humanity.
No, 144,000 get saved.
Yeah, the end of a system.
And yeah, in that case, I do agree.
We are coming to the end of this system, but something will replace it.
And I think that when the system ends we have also an opportunity to shape the things to come.
And I think that our conversation now is part of it because we have to think about who we are and what we want.
Do we want to be slaves or do we want to be free?
And if we're free, what do we want to do with our lives?
What do we want?
Do we want all to drive Ferraris or do we want more meaningful time with our friends and family?
And so on and so forth.
So I think that We have to, you know, there has to be some introspection and some analysis and research to understand the issues, to share that understanding with others, to discuss, to probably connect with people locally, you know, to cultivate our local communities, because there's enormous power in that, you know, there's enormous power in people just talking to one another and
You know, just knowing what your neighbors are, who they are, what they're capable of, how they can help you, how you can help them.
You know, you're already gaining a great deal of resilience, and you can see that this is exactly what the authorities don't want us to do, because try to organize a local conference of local people, just law-abiding people coming together to talk.
You'll see that the governments are going to go out of their way to try to prevent the gathering from happening.
I've got to ask you, because of your peculiar circumstances, you must hang out with people at least the upper tiers.
Do you get the vibe that they're waking up to what's going on?
I don't hang out with apeteers.
I'm a bit of a workaholic, so I spend most, you know, I'm between eating, sleeping, working and raising my kids.
And then occasionally I do.
Most of my friends around Monaco are millionaires, and I do occasionally hang out with them.
You know, I don't go party every day, but you know, an occasional lunch or a refreshment in the evening.
And I think that the apeteers are in a very peculiar position because, sadly, while they have means, they're also deathly afraid of losing their means.
So they're deathly afraid of exposing themselves to something that might turn out controversial.
So I'll give you an example.
When the pandemic started, And they started the lockdowns and then the schools only started next September.
So the lockdowns came in March.
The schools were out and they only started in September.
When the school started in September, I saw that, you know, we realized that the kids are going to have to wear masks.
And I was also afraid that they're going to force vaccinate them, you know.
And so I tried to organize people to put up some resistance.
And so I did an email to all of my local contacts and I said, let's get together.
This is not a time to prevaricate and hedge.
This is a time to put up a resistance because our children are going to be suffering for this and maybe get damaged.
Their health will be damaged.
And I know for sure that some of the people on that list agreed with me, but not a single one of them turned up.
Not a one.
Many people did turn up, but from other groups.
Of my contacts, of all these, you know, apeteers, not a single one.
I was actually very disappointed because I felt like, you fucker!
Can I cuss?
Yeah, well, you just did.
Yeah.
You're so afraid of losing your wealth that you're just going to let your child walk into a lion den.
You're not going to stand up for your child.
So that's the problem with the apeteers.
Many of them get it.
But they fear the stigma, they fear sanctions, they fear losing their business.
You know, many of them are in the finance industry and they might lose their investors or they might get their accounts blocked or whatnot.
And so better let the kids wear the masks and get the vaccines than losing your money.
Well, unfortunately.
That's why it says in Matthew 6, lay not up for yourself treasures on earth where moth and rust are corrupt and thieves break through and steal.
I mean, that's the problem.
Exactly.
And it took me to pandemic to realize what they meant by that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of wisdom, a lot of wisdom in that book.
Yes, absolutely.
You make the point well, that once people are ensnared by the beast system, it's got them, hasn't it?
It's very hard to... Yeah, it is, it is.
And I know this because I was ensnared also, but the beast spit me out and it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
You do look quite healthy, actually, Alex, I have to say.
Well, thank you very much.
I eat only organic food.
You don't get to look like this at the age of 80 by eating junk food.
You're never 80 Alex, no.
You don't look over 75.
I'm 54 but I actually live a very clean life.
I don't drink any alcohol.
I don't do any drugs.
I try to eat healthy.
I try to exercise on a regular basis.
We're getting to the age where the machine is starting to get tired and you have to put some effort into the maintenance.
What are you going to do when it all kicks off?
I can't imagine everyone's got an allotment in Monaco.
Nobody can grow their own food, can they?
No, no, no, no.
It's apartments.
I think that, yeah, you might have a little bit of a rooftop garden or a tiny little garden in front, but nothing, no.
Well, there's a lot of... Many people have properties or rentals in the surrounding areas.
I know people who bring food in those crates where they put whatever is fresh that week.
And they bring you like a big, big box of produce.
Yeah, so you can do that.
You can have weekly deliveries of locally produced organic produce.
Oh, nice.
And I used to do that.
I used to do that, except that the guy was cheating.
He was cheating because sometimes he would forget to take off the sticker from the apples.
And sometimes he'd bring me like a beautiful, perfect orange in May.
And I thought, dude, you didn't drop this yourself.
You're a cheat.
So I quit.
I quit paying him.
By the way, sorry, this is completely irrelevant to anything else we've been discussing, but do you speak Russian?
No, I speak a tiny little bit because I spent two weeks in a full immersion intensive course, so I learned a little bit.
And I learned that Russian is very similar to Croatian, which is my mother tongue.
And so I understand it a bit more than I speak, but I would need probably another six weeks in an intensive course to learn it.
So I would say on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm about between 2 and 3.
I've just started learning Russian on the Duolingo course.
Oh, brilliant!
And I wanted to test my Russian on you.
OK, what am I saying?
Где наша кошка?
Наша кошка is our chicken, but what does... No, it's not!
It's a cat!
Well, yeah, that's what I said!
As far as I understand it, где наша кошка means where is our cat.
I've got to ask you before we go, Alex, what's happening in the markets, in the commodities?
is crap that's why I did I couldn't help it I've got to ask you before we go Alex what where what's happening in the markets in the commodities I mean I see gold sort of hovering between uh well it's it's had a bull run in there and then it's retreated a bit and it's going and people are talking excitedly about silver At the moment, nothing much is happening.
The only market that had a, well, a few markets had meaningful moves, but it was mostly soft commodities, things like cocoa, frozen orange juice, coffee a little bit.
For the rest, everything is kind of in a holding pattern.
It goes a little bit up, a little bit down.
There hasn't been any significant trends, but that's kind of normal.
That's how it goes.
Markets go through very strong trends, and then they go through long periods of corrections, consolidations.
Okay, so I'm a trend follower by conviction and by profession, and I know many other trend followers, and the belief among us is that markets tend to trend about one-third of the time, and they tend to consolidate about two-thirds and the belief among us is that markets tend to trend about one-third of the Ballpark that's going to be about correct.
And I think that, you know, we had a very strong price trends in gold and silver and crude oil and copper and palladium a few years ago, 2021-2022.
And now we're in a, you know, we had a big correction in 2023 and now it's just kind of, so nothing's going on.
But I think that we are probably in the early innings of the commodity super cycle.
Which might span anything between 10 and 25 years.
And I think that gradually we're going to see very strong price events in the commodities markets.
Not overnight, but they're probably going to.
Okay, to give you an example.
Last time we had a strong inflation episode in the United States, in the West, was the 1970s.
Yeah?
And it was gradual.
It spanned about 10 to 15 years before it unraveled.
And gold went from $35 an ounce in 1970 or 71, and it reached $850 in 1980.
in 1970 or 71, and it reached $850 in 1980.
So it appreciated 24-fold.
And I think that silver appreciated closer to 50-fold.
So I think that those events are ahead of us.
I think that we might have very strong appreciation in precious metals and energy.
And I think that the food, agricultural commodities are going to follow suit as well.
But it's not, you know, nobody should take this as investment advice, like they should run out and start buying commodities.
Yeah, because, you know, things happen unpredictably and in spurts that you can't tell when it's going to start, when it's going to end, how high it's going to go, how long it's going to last.
So I would, you know, if I should give any piece of advice to people, I would say to accumulate a little bit of physical gold and silver, just in case, you know, diversify your holdings.
If you possibly can, to own a small plot of land where you can maybe Have chickens or grow some vegetables or an orchard.
And most importantly, probably, is to reach out to your neighbors, organize community events, even small ones.
When things come to a grinding halt, people will get enormous resilience just by knowing which one of your neighbors might help you set up a local area network.
Who knows how to fix teeth?
Who knows how to fix roofs?
Who knows how to fix cars?
Who can grow a little bit of food?
Who knows how to cook?
Who can help the elderly?
Who can help the children?
And so, that is...
That resilience will help people get through any crisis.
If we're all just isolated in our pods between the, you know, the driver and driveway and the office and Starbucks, we are screwed and we're in a lot of danger.
So, you know, that would be my probably number one piece of advice for anybody.
That's good.
That's much better than any financial advice.
I agree.
Yeah, good.
Well, thank you so much, Alex.
Always a great pleasure, James.
It's been a while.
I thought it was something I said the last time that you didn't have me for such a long time.
Do you know what?
My instant reaction, even as I was talking to you last time, was, I love this guy.
I tell you what I like about you, is that you How can I put this?
Well, you're like me in a way.
That you say exactly how it is.
You don't try and second-guess anything.
You don't try and... Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
That's actually true and I think that I have... I'm very fortunate in that I'm not beholden to any interest.
You know, like I'm not a professor at a university.
I don't work for any bank or hedge fund firm.
I've become independent over the last four years.
And so that gives me... I don't have to be so afraid about how something I say could jeopardize my career.
It's the only way to be.
Yes, that's the only way to be.
I didn't really understand this until I found myself... Tucker said something very interesting.
I found this quote by him, and he said, the more you tell the truth, the more powerful you are.
And I was, oh my God, you know, there's actually something to that.
And so, you know, I'm very thankful that I'm in a position where I can say what I think.
I don't have to worry about what my boss will think.
So, yeah.
Good.
Well, thank you very much.
Great pleasure, James, as always.
And again, warm greetings to all your viewers and listeners and until the next happy time.
Do you want to plug anything?
Do you want to mention where people can find your stuff?
Well, yeah, sure, sure, sure, yes.
So I'm easy to find on X. My handle is AtNakedHedgie.
And I write on Substack, Alex Craner's Trend Compass.
And then from there, it's easy to find.
There's a couple of other platforms, but it's easy to find it from there.
Great.
And my beloved viewers and listeners, thank you.
Thank you for watching and listening.
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