Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Frances Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for

you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a writer,

cultural commentator. She's the host of the Subversive Podcast. Alex Kershuta, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a great pleasure to have you on the show.

We've been meaning to get you on for a long time. Tell us who you are, first of all, because you've

got an interesting story, which I think informs a lot of the views that you have as well, which

we're going to get to. So tell everybody, who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the

journey that leads you through life to be here talking to us? Oh, yeah, a very long story,

which involves a escape from the clutches of Eastern Europe, living in the West for about

probably 12 years in total, and now back in the last year, living in the Corona bunker in my

hometown in Transylvania. So it's been a journey, I have to say, but that's not the only thing.

I mean, I've been a journalist. I've worked in tech. Now I work in finance related to tech.

Yeah, it's quite many things have happened in the last 12 years. And like you said, they've

informed my view on a lot of things. Well, an interesting piece of your journey is you were part of

I imagine the sort of brain drain from Eastern Europe, people who are young, bright, well educated,

et cetera, going over to the West. And you get here, you lived in London for five years, you get

a job, you have a good job, you live in London. And increasingly, you find that the sort of promise

of everything that the West offers, particularly the way that it's sort of configured at the moment,

is not fulfilling your actual needs and wishes. And it's increasingly making you feel lonely and

unhappy. Yes, I think that's that's kind of the pattern that I saw in myself first and foremost,

but also in a lot of people around me. There was this prescribed ladder that when must climb up,

you know, first you get to the West few, you made it, maybe you go to school there. That's also

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