Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
How to Stay Financially Resilient as World War 3 Develops w/ Alex Krainer
472 Plays2 years ago
Alex Krainer, a former hedge fund manager and author of three books, joins us today to talk geopolitics, financial markets, AI, and more. He has some pertinent advice on how you can position yourself to weather the coming financial and geopolitical storm.
He now offers two of this books on trading for free, so make sure you check out the link below to download your copies.
Links to Alex's work:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NakedHedgie
Web: https://thenakedhedgie.com/
I-System Trend Following: https://isystem-tf.com/
Substack: https://substack.com/profile/21365744-alex-krainer
Download his two books on trading here: https://isystem-tf.com/about/
Grand Deception: The Truth About Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act, and Anti-Russian Sanctions: https://www.redpillpress.com/shop/grand-deception-bill-browder-magnitsky-act-russian-sanctions/
Links to Christian's resources:
Health consulting: https://christianyordanov.com/health-consulting/
Links to my book Autism Wellbeing Plan: How to Get Your Child Healthy:
US Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Autism-Wellbeing-Plan-Child-Healthy/dp/1916393004
UK Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Autism-Wellbeing-Plan-Child-Healthy-ebook/dp/B084GBBDL9
My podcast, Autism and Children's Health: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autism-and-childrens-health-lab-testing-diet/id1512380225
Website: https://christianyordanov.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Alex Crainer
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the Connecting Minds podcast. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Alex Crainer. He is the founder at Crainer Analytics. He is the author of three books, I believe. So one of them is called Mastering and Certainty in Commodities Trading. The other one is
00:00:22
Speaker
Alex Crainer's trend following Bible. And I believe you have another book, Alex, called The Great Deception. Can you tell us, first of all, welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your work and what you do?
The Controversy of 'Grand Deception'
00:00:41
Speaker
Yeah. Hi, Chris. Thank you for having me. I'm a former hedge fund manager, and so the books you listed, yeah, two of them are about
00:00:53
Speaker
investment management and commodities trading. The book called Grand Deception is more of a geopolitical treatise, which I felt compelled to write about, even though it's not my strict, you know, I'm not a journalist, I'm not a historian, but I felt compelled to write about it because I, through my work, I came into contact with certain people. And
00:01:23
Speaker
the central character of them being William Browder. And as I learned about what they do and their activism, I realized that this is the network that is pushing us into World War III against Russia.
00:01:45
Speaker
And so at some point, I felt like, well, somebody has to unmask these people. People have to understand what's going on here. And because I thought maybe I knew more than most people about it, I felt like, well, it might as well be me. So that's how it started. I just sort of thought, I have to sit down, try to put this together. Also because if we end up in World War III,
00:02:15
Speaker
I have to be able to tell myself that I've done everything I could to prevent it from happening. So that's how the book came about.
Amazon's Ban and Its Impact
00:02:22
Speaker
Unfortunately, it didn't last a long time after I self published it on Amazon in 2017. Okay. And I think it took about five or six weeks for it to be to be banned. Wow. Because yeah, what happened is that a historian
00:02:46
Speaker
read the book in the US and published a book review on Huffington Post. And then the book review disappeared within a few hours. And then one week later, the book was deleted on Amazon. And, you know, I know how it was deleted. It was Amazon received a letter from Juan Jonathan Weiner, who is
00:03:14
Speaker
Bill Browder's lawyer and who also worked for the State Department as like a policy advisor to John Kerry under Obama administration. And so the book was banned at that point. Then there was a publishing company named Red Bill Press. They approached me and they said, well, you know, this is a good book and we might be able to
00:03:41
Speaker
republish it. So they spend the next nine months combing through everything to make sure that nothing is controversial or at least that nothing couldn't be backed up. Sure, sure. That they would make them open to lawsuits. We changed the title because the original title was not Grand Deception. It was the killing of William Browder. And we thought like, okay, maybe the title was also potentially an offending element.
00:04:11
Speaker
So we changed the title to Grand Deception and then they republished it indeed. And I think, again, five or six weeks later, the book was banned again. It's available for sale now, but only from their website. It's not available in Amazon or any other bookstore.
00:04:31
Speaker
But you offer it for free as a download along with the other two books on your website, correct?
Alternatives to Big Tech
00:04:36
Speaker
No. I offer my trading books as free downloads because what happened is that eventually Amazon entirely canceled me. They deleted my whole account, all the book reviews. I had virtually four and five star book reviews on everything.
00:04:55
Speaker
They deleted everything and they even stole my royalties because they didn't pay me any royalties for nearly four years. And they just one day wrote me a new email saying like, we're canceling your account and we won't pay you out anything. Man, you got cancelled before it was cool, Alex.
00:05:19
Speaker
Well, with Grand Deception, yes. With the other books, it was only about a year ago. It was in October 2021. But then they continued selling my books. And one of my books called The Mastering Uncertainty in Commodities Trading, it was awarded as a number one book on commodities for investors and traders. And they set the price at 900 euros.
00:05:49
Speaker
But not, you know, I wasn't getting any of this. So they continued selling my work, zero for me. And I thought, you know, like it's just the idea that people might spend 900 euros on a title that benefits only Amazon. I thought no way. So I put it up on my website as a free download. So at least I hope that nobody buys it off of Amazon.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah, man. That is just beyond preposterous. Yeah, it is. But it's a sign of the times. That's how it is. I know I'm not the only one. They do it to many people. Amazon is very abusive. It's really... They have a very aggressive corporate culture.
00:06:33
Speaker
It's a pirate mentality. If they think they can get away with it, they will do it, whether it's legal, whether it's ethical, you know, it's, it's, it'd be very difficult for me to see, seek a legal recourse against Amazon. Oh, yes. You know, they, they have armies of lawyers on retainer. You know, hiring a lawyer can cost you easily a thousand bucks an hour. Yeah. So they know this, they know that the barriers are very high that,
00:07:01
Speaker
you know, struggling authors and content creators cannot even dream about doing making a lawsuit, taking a lawsuit against Amazon. So they reckon, you know, like if it's not Donald Trump or, you know, somebody really famous, yeah, they can just steal your money and they do. So that's that's how it is. But, you know, eventually chickens comes come home to roost.
00:07:28
Speaker
I know that there are many existing and upcoming new platforms that will eventually drive traffic from content creators
Is World War III Underway?
00:07:42
Speaker
into new alternative markets and in the end Amazon's gonna probably pay for their abuse. I hope so because you know like I try for the last couple of years or more I try as hard as I can to get away from these big large centralized providers so I'm like one of probably very few people that I know
00:08:09
Speaker
that I don't use Android or iOS for my phone. I have Graphene OS, which is a kind of de-Googled sort of version of Android on my phone. I only use Google Maps once in a while.
00:08:31
Speaker
And that phone stays in a fair day bag that is hidden away so it can't spy. So I've done everything I can to reduce dependence on these services for email, everything else. But the hardest has been getting off of Amazon because
00:08:49
Speaker
especially i kind of live in a small town in the south of portugoe and there's like six different types of stores in every every city here and you know you if you want cool shit you have to use amazon so i i mean like racking my brain how can we decouple ourselves from these big providers so i am looking for like
00:09:09
Speaker
manufacturers of goods and services and providers of services here in Europe that I can use instead of Amazon for future purchases. I think it's really important that we do that. I am a subscriber of your sub-stack, Alex. I think you're doing some amazing work.
00:09:28
Speaker
in terms of spreading awareness and that's why i wanted to have you on because it's guys like you that we need that are pushing forward for the betterment of humanity and everybody does it in their own way.
00:09:47
Speaker
What I really like about you as well is you seem to be very positive. A lot of researchers in this field have gone very, very sour. We are going to cover some negative aspects.
00:10:07
Speaker
Do you think is going on right now? Are we truly, you know, potentially steps away months or like a couple of years away from World War
Predictions on Inflation and Economic Crisis
00:10:17
Speaker
Three? What do you reckon? Well, in a way, we already are in World War Three, you know, only it's not exactly happening the way the way World War One and World War Two happened. But, you know, even World War One and World War Two, you know, they
00:10:35
Speaker
They had a long gestation before the outbreak. Now before the breakout outbreak would be a pandemic. And then even after the breakout, you know, not everybody joins straight away. You know, so there's a lot of diplomacy going on to try to encourage various nations to join the war effort and
00:11:06
Speaker
We saw that with World War I. We saw it with World War II, particularly, you know, the United States only joined relatively late when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. It wasn't just Germany. It was like a whole coalition of countries that were brought together, including
00:11:26
Speaker
you know, Romania and Hungary and Sweden and Denmark and Finland, Spaniards and Italians and Croats sent these groups and material and so on. So it isn't exactly the black and white that then ends up
00:11:42
Speaker
in the simplified versions of history that they teach us in school. It's much more complicated than that. And the same is going on now. We are one year into the war in Ukraine, which could always escalate to evolve a NATO country, which would then bring more NATO countries in it.
00:12:05
Speaker
Visibly, visibly, people are reluctant. Leadership of all these nations are reluctant to get involved because they understand that, you know, a lot of bad things can happen and hardly anything good can come out of this war. But nevertheless, you know, the secret diplomacy from the United States, well, not even so secret anymore, from the United States and Britain particularly and from
00:12:32
Speaker
certain other NATO nations and the intelligence agencies are working overtime to try to escalate the conflict, to bring more nations into it, to break off the bonds between Russia and nations that support it, to blackmail and intimidate them and sanction them. And so, you know, the war is evolving. Its nature is
00:13:04
Speaker
Its nature is as George Soros correctly characterized it as a conflict between two systems of governance. But the intensity of the conflict, the scope of it, it's not just in the fields
00:13:24
Speaker
of Ukraine that is going on. It's going on in the financial domain, economic domain, global trading, and even state terrorism, as we saw with the bombing of, with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. And it involves many nations in various ways. And the way that nations are involved at the moment could be different.
00:13:51
Speaker
in the future. Now obviously the worst possible outcome would be if this escalated to a nuclear exchange because that, you know, my understanding of that is that if that happens then all bets are off and I think that the lucky ones
00:14:12
Speaker
will be the ones who die on that day and the unlucky ones will probably suffer the consequences, which might include hunger and disease and complete collapse of society and maybe
00:14:31
Speaker
die a slow agonizing
Market Trends and Investment Strategies
00:14:33
Speaker
death over the later years. We don't know because we don't have a precedent. But I think that while we're alive and kicking, I think everybody who's in any way protagonist of this drama should agitate to make sure that this doesn't happen.
00:14:57
Speaker
Absolutely, brother. Just because you are so well versed in the markets, and I'm quite curious to kind of get your take on things before we move to more geopolitical stuff, what
00:15:14
Speaker
What do you think are some likely I think actually this morning I watched your your latest video on your YouTube channel where it's like at some Conference I think in China where you talk about there's basics about trading and uncertainty and you put it really well that it's really uncertainty to the investor slash trader or any anybody the farmer even and
00:15:36
Speaker
Uncertainty is the thing that we really focus a lot of time and effort to mitigate and navigate. I believe this decade
00:15:52
Speaker
is the highest uncertainty that potentially we'll see in all of our lifetimes, people that are alive right now. So with that said, and given that you've done quite a bit of analysis on a lot of these topics, what do you think are some likely
00:16:12
Speaker
directions the markets could go and just to kind of preamble, you know, the topics that are at least are of interest to me is so that there's the gold, the gold brawls that are like saying, gold will, you know, potentially 10x from here. You know, obviously, we know that central banks are stockpiling gold for
00:16:32
Speaker
for years and years now. Do you think the Fed will continue quantitative tightening? Do you think that the dollar will indeed collapse? Do you think that the CBDC
00:16:47
Speaker
will get ushered in as part of some type of, you know, potentially cyber attack that will be blamed or China, Russia or whatever else. What do you think are kind of this decade? I know it's a massive question, brother. I'm sorry. But what do you think is going to happen, basically? What are some likely outcomes at least? Well, that's a great question. And that's the question that's on pretty much everybody's mind.
00:17:17
Speaker
The uncertainty is probably as thick as we've ever seen it, because we may be at the beginning of the end of a system that's shaped Western societies for multiple centuries, depending on how you want to cut it. But it's at least between two and six centuries, maybe more.
00:17:43
Speaker
And what happens after the soul unravels and as it unravels is difficult to predict. However, we know a few things pretty much for sure.
00:17:57
Speaker
And that is that we will have an inflationary unraveling. OK, so at the moment, the Federal Reserve in the United States is in its QT phase. So we have quantitative tightening. The Fed is very, very gradually normalizing its balance sheet.
00:18:21
Speaker
And they're a bit less gradually hiking the interest rates, although we may be close to the end of that cycle. But regardless of that, inflation won't go away. They're not going to go back to their inflation target of 2.2%. And then very recently, they raised that to 2.8%. It's very, very unlikely that that's going to happen.
00:18:51
Speaker
interest rates and monetary inflation are only two elements in the inflation formula.
Building Community Resilience
00:19:00
Speaker
If you rapidly expand the M2 money aggregates, that can push up inflation.
00:19:17
Speaker
But there's also money velocity, right? So if you have, I don't know, $10 trillion in circulation and money velocity is one, that's the same situation as if you have half the monetary aggregate. So $5 trillion in circulation and monetary velocity is two.
00:19:42
Speaker
So, even if the Fed hikes the interest rates and reverses the inflation of monetary aggregates, we've seen that money velocity has started to gradually pick up and the Fed has no control over this. This is entirely a market element because it reflects
00:20:09
Speaker
When people are comfortable holding cash, money velocity may be low. When people are worried that the purchasing power of their cash is collapsing, they will be quick to get rid of it. So they will try to buy things that they feel that they need. They might buy gold, silver. They might stock up on things that they need, or they might buy anything that they think will retain value over time.
00:20:35
Speaker
which also means that they might be buying stocks and bonds. And so, you know, when you go into an inflation, anyway, so just to finish up the idea that we're not
00:20:51
Speaker
going back to the 2.8% inflation rate. There's also commodity prices which the Fed does not control. So commodity prices are very sensitive to liquidity conditions in the market so you might even in a
00:21:07
Speaker
Otherwise, very bullish environment for commodities. You could see commodity prices collapse rapidly at some point. As we saw with the pandemic three years ago, when oil prices, for example, crashed by almost 80%, that can happen in a shorter time span. But the longer trend is bullish. And many people in the markets, I think rightly,
00:21:36
Speaker
expect that over the next 10 to 25 years we're going to see a commodity supercycle. If you go back about 150 to 200 years you see that there are these massive cycles in commodities markets where commodities go and have high prices and then they collapse and these cycles take a very long time.
00:22:02
Speaker
And just very recently, we were at historical lows at where commodity prices were compared to other financial assets. So compared to stocks, bonds, real estate, and so forth, commodities were really at 50-year lows. And now we've seen this cycle only begin to turn. And most probably, commodity prices will continue to rise in nominal terms, but also versus other
00:22:32
Speaker
financial assets for the next 10 to 25 years. Obviously, this is going to include precious metals as well. So gold and silver for sure are very likely to be much, much higher 10 years from now than they are today. I think that 10 times up is realistic, maybe even conservative. Maybe it'll be more than that. Really? In the next 10, 25 years? Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
00:23:01
Speaker
You know, gold and silver, they tend to trail the commodity basket, right? Empirically, gold and silver do appreciate with inflation, but they usually follow things like energy, industrial metals like copper, aluminum, and so forth, and agricultural commodities too. Nevertheless, you know,
00:23:32
Speaker
It's, it's a very good idea to have some of your assets invested into gold and silver and to have some physical gold and silver on hand, you know, for emergencies. If there's, if there's some really, really rough patches where, you know, maybe food becomes difficult to obtain, maybe you have to bribe a government bureaucrat to be able to, you know, travel or, you know. Yeah.
00:24:00
Speaker
to do something, I don't know, get a bed in a hospital or I don't know what. So that's always a very good idea. And now how the World War III situation unravels, we have no idea, but you know, if you analyze
00:24:22
Speaker
the situation down to its basic component.
Media Narratives vs. Decentralized Communication
00:24:26
Speaker
Our chief problem is the monetary system, because everything is measured in dollars and euros and yen and pounds and so forth. And the economy is only denominated in these currencies. The currencies don't reflect the economy. The economy is people doing what they do.
00:24:48
Speaker
and exchanging. A farmer raises his crops. The baker bakes the bread. Unless there's some massive natural disaster, the land still is capable of producing food. The farmers are still capable of growing the food.
00:25:12
Speaker
car mechanics can still repair cars and so forth. So the economy can chug along regardless of the circumstances. When we had the war in the countries of former Yugoslavia, the pharmacies were still fully stocked up. The supermarkets were fully stocked up. You would get your car fixed. You could go to the pump and put gas in your car. Everything continues to function.
00:25:38
Speaker
We even traded with the other side, our enemies. We traded back and forth. They needed to buy oil. We had oil. We exchanged it for whatever they had. So war doesn't mean that everything comes to a grinding halt. And so people shouldn't be afraid of that. But they should be concerned about losing access to money as means of exchange. Because that's where things can grind to a halt.
00:26:10
Speaker
If the farmer can't pay for the fertilizers and other stuff that they need, maybe they can't raise the crops now, for real. If the baker can't pay for the wheat, maybe they can't bake bread. If people can't pay for the bread, maybe the baker goes out of business because even though people need the bread and baker can bake the bread, the exchange cannot happen, right?
00:26:38
Speaker
We need alternative solutions to this. So we need alternative currencies. And I'm not necessarily talking about Bitcoin, which has largely become an object of speculation, not a real legitimate means of exchange. Most people who trade Bitcoin trade it for capital gains, not to buy stuff, right? Sure, sure, yeah.
00:27:01
Speaker
But, you know, in crisis situations, people have always worked out local currencies, alternative regional currencies, you know, they use they do time banks, they use gifts, you know, they just they just share.
00:27:15
Speaker
with people around themselves and receive other things. So this will happen, but, you know, the real resilience will be exactly there for us to have things to exchange with other members of our community and for us to have means of exchanging. And it's not rocket science, you know, it can be worked out. And the conference I've just been to last weekend in Ireland, it was exactly about that, you know, like it was local people.
00:27:43
Speaker
realizing that some kind of a big storm is coming. We can't tell what it is or what it will be like, but people are connecting with each other. They're talking to each other. They're investing in solutions for these types of emergency. And I believe that even if things get ugly for a season, we'll come through and, you know,
00:28:13
Speaker
will be the better off for it. And I actually believe that will be a lot better off once this whole crisis unravels. Hard times create strong men and all that. Well, yeah, but I think it's more than that. I think it goes beyond that. You know, it's not just strong men and women and all other genders, obviously. But I think that
00:28:43
Speaker
The information infrastructure that we have today is making us a lot smarter. Humanity has never had the internet. This point-to-point instant communications that encompass the whole planet, we never had that. We always depended on information and narratives
00:29:12
Speaker
broadcast from, you know, central sources like newspapers and radio and television. It was relatively easy to control the narrative and to filter the information we obtained.
00:29:26
Speaker
today this is not so easy. And you can tell that the powers that be are kind of panicking. They're not gone hysterical about disinformation and misinformation. They're like thrashing around trying to censor content. Now they're trying because obviously they're not comfortable, right? If they were comfortable, they wouldn't be talking about this. They're trying to use AI to control what's being
00:29:56
Speaker
discuss between people. Now they have identified that the chief source of disinformation and misinformation are exactly podcasts.
Lessons from the Yugoslav War
00:30:05
Speaker
So what we're doing now, you know, and then so, you know, like this is very difficult because, you know, like we might be talking here for for an hour or two or three. And so, you know, it's not easy for sensors to, you know, sit through hours and hours of
00:30:23
Speaker
tens of thousands of podcasts that are out there to work out which ones should be censored and which ones can be allowed in the information universe. And so they're trying with AI. I have no idea how they're going to work it out, but while they're working on their AI, we're going to be reaching thousands of people who are going to be reaching tens of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of people. So they are way, way, way behind.
00:30:53
Speaker
And so this really radically changes the equations that they thought they would use in their ability to manipulate the public around whatever agenda they're trying to pursue, you know, the pandemic, the climate emergency, the war against Russia and China and so forth. And it's really not going the way they planned and the way they thought things would
00:31:20
Speaker
work out and it feels to me like these globalists are not pushing on a string trying to manipulate how things evolve.
00:31:36
Speaker
For sure, I definitely agree that the internet got away from them. Whatever they were planning with ARPA, Darpanet and all that good stuff, that did not transpire.
00:31:51
Speaker
I really love Charlie Robinson. I love when he characterizes it as definitely this pandemic thing is not going according to plan because if plan A is offering fucking donuts and whatever else for people to get jobs, then you know what I mean? I don't know. I don't know what they were thinking in the planning room, you know?
00:32:16
Speaker
Alex, I want to do a fun little thought experiment if you would please humor me, bro. Let's pretend you have like a regular average monthly income and you have 100,000 euro in the bank. How would you
00:32:38
Speaker
allocate this €100,000 in terms of commodities, physical resources, crypto, cash in the bank, cash at hand, whatever. What would you do to just be in the best position possible for the coming times?
00:33:02
Speaker
Okay, good question. So, I would definitely diversify. That's step one. Importantly, and this is not allocation of the hundred thousand bucks, importantly, in an inflation crisis, it is very, very important to downsize, to keep your costs low.
00:33:31
Speaker
because people who have large car payments could be in trouble. People who have mortgages could be in trouble. So if you can, a good way to weather the crisis would be to try to keep your cost of living as low as possible. With regards to your savings,
00:33:59
Speaker
You might want to hold some of that in gold and silver. Again, physical. Second, you might consider buying a plot of land for agricultural purposes. Many people think that real estate is a good hedge against inflation. It is not.
00:34:25
Speaker
Okay, so prices of real estate do tend to go up in an inflation but inflation normally far outstrips the appreciation of real estate prices. When the inflation, hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic a hundred years ago unraveled,
00:34:53
Speaker
At the end of 1922, you could buy a six-bedroom villa on the outskirts of Berlin for $100.
The Limitations of AI
00:35:03
Speaker
Okay? People lose purchasing power altogether, so they don't have money to buy any real estate.
00:35:13
Speaker
Whereas you have a lot of people who maybe made heavy investments in real estate, who need money, who are ready to sell it for whatever. And so, you know, at the time the dollar was still gold backed and people were so desperate that they were ready to part with their, you know, bill as for a hundred dollars. This is a well, well, you know, so the idea that you're going to, whether the, the, the inflation,
00:35:40
Speaker
by having a lot of investment in real estate is not necessarily correct. Again, I don't wanna sound like called gloom and doom because we don't know how the inflation is gonna go. It might be a horrible event like the Weimar Republic in Germany, like places like Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, like Soviet Union and so forth. And in that case, yeah, all bets are off and people are gonna lose
00:36:09
Speaker
purchasing power very rapidly and in massive amounts. And in that case, things like real estate are not going to help you. However, arable land, land that you can use to raise chickens or grow potatoes or vegetables or whatever, that will help you, especially if you know how to use it. That will help you weather the crisis.
00:36:33
Speaker
And with regards to other assets, literally commodities and farmland are the only effective means of hedging against inflation. For the rest, see what skills you have that can be useful within your local communities that you can exchange locally. If you know how to cook, if you know how to fix cars,
00:37:03
Speaker
help people with their IT and internet connections, stuff like that, make yourself useful to your local community, strengthen these community bonds, and seek resilience in this way. And those 100,000 euros might even be very, very useful in, you know, some of these solutions might require
00:37:32
Speaker
and investments, well, they usually require some investment. And so I think that people ought to think about these types of things, you know, learn how to fish if you can, learn how to do useful things that, you know, if supermarkets are empty or close, if we end up bailed in by the banking system and suddenly, you know, like you don't have your cash, you have worthless shares of your banks.
00:38:02
Speaker
Well, then things could get really, really difficult and we need to think a little bit outside of the box of this matrix. Just, you know, stop showing precious metals and real estate. What about cryptocurrency? Do you see any merit in having some allocation there? Yeah, I do. But again, only
00:38:24
Speaker
only within the framework of diversification. I think people shouldn't think about cryptocurrencies as some kind of magical solution to all our problems. I would say if you have 100,000 bucks, maybe put 30,000 into farmland, put 20,000, 30,000 into gold and silver, put 30,000
00:38:52
Speaker
or maybe even less into things like Bitcoin. I think that we don't know what's going to happen with cryptocurrencies. We don't know what's going to happen with Bitcoin. When people think like, how low could it go? I always tell them, well, it could go to zero. There's no guarantees that Bitcoin is going to be anything 10 years from now because it is
00:39:19
Speaker
Let's say that the technology is very impressive and extremely useful. It could be a game changer for humanity. But as a means of exchange, it could be a game changer when you can maybe go into a shop and pay for your bread and milk with Bitcoin or buy your coffee with Bitcoin. At that point, it's a massive game changer.
00:39:46
Speaker
But just as an investment thing, it's become just another thing that fluctuates, like gold, like silver, like oil. Again, it's a legitimate investment to diversify into, but it's not necessarily a solution to all of everybody's asset problems.
00:40:09
Speaker
It also looks like it's become just another part of the greater market, you know, Wall Street's portfolio of assets to manipulate, you know, with the futures, you know, coming into play as well. So I think the other thing is also
00:40:36
Speaker
for anyone kind of that follows a little bit of what the World Economic Forum do, I'm sure you're one of those folks. You know, the latest sort of, there was a paper they published quite recently, and I think that their managing director dude, I forget, Jurgen something, he said, he believes
00:41:00
Speaker
There will be a catastrophic, and that's the word he used, you know, catastrophic cyber attack in the next couple of years. And, you know, the word catastrophic, I think we're very desensitized for many reasons.
Critique of Globalist Agendas
00:41:18
Speaker
We're very desensitized to words like
00:41:22
Speaker
awesome, incredible, catastrophic, you know what I mean? Like when people of that level of insider, when they say catastrophic, like catastrophic is like your fucking
00:41:40
Speaker
like the Titanic hitting an iceberg. That's like your fucking plane hitting the side of a mountain. That's when you actually think about what a catastrophe, like in my language in Bulgarian, katastrofa means like car crash. Like when your car crashes into another car, that's a katastrofa. You know what I mean? So things like digital assets and the way I
00:42:05
Speaker
I envision it like a worst case scenario if the power goes out for a month or whatever or even a week all around or a whole region, a whole continent. When the power goes back, you can bet your sweet ass that the equities are going to have the biggest gap down in their history ever and everything is going to be like
00:42:30
Speaker
down 80-90%. Everyone will be trying to run through the door, but maybe there will be the powers that will be orchestrating these events. Maybe they'll be buying the bottom.
00:42:45
Speaker
or maybe they're, you know, God knows, but all of these digital assets won't be really worth a damn then, or they might be worth a hell of a lot less. So you could effectively, if all your wealth is in them, you could effectively lose your wealth 80, 90%, like in a day or in, you know, if a cyber attack does indeed occur the way, the worst case scenario at least, that could happen. What's your thoughts on that?
00:43:16
Speaker
I don't know, it's very hard to, it would be very hard for me to imagine what was going to happen with that. I don't know what a cyber attack would look like. I don't know what a catastrophic cyber attack might look like. What would be the consequences of it? It's difficult to say, Chris. If we lost the internet from one day to the next and it never came back, well, you know, that would be,
00:43:46
Speaker
That would be a shame, but we've been around for thousands of years without the internet, so people will work it out. It would be a shame not to be able to connect and share information in real time across the world and be shielded from the hail of bullshit that is always being thrown our way by the so-called legacy media.
00:44:15
Speaker
But still, you know, life goes on. You need a roof over your head and you need food on your table, primarily. And so those will be the priorities in any emergency situation. What's going to happen to financial assets is hard to say because
00:44:40
Speaker
You know, in conditions where you have very high levels of inflation, stock markets tend to go vertical. They tend to go up. It doesn't matter, you know, if the companies are profitable, what the valuations are.
00:45:00
Speaker
People want to be rid of their paper currency because they're afraid that it's losing purchasing power every day. And it's better to own anything than to be sitting on cash. So, you know, maybe they, everybody plows their money into, into, into the stocks. And then, you know, you get, you get this, you know, we saw this in many, you know, again, Weimar, Germany, Venezuela.
00:45:27
Speaker
Zimbabwe, Argentina, Israel in 1986. It's not because these countries are doing well economically. It's because people completely lost confidence in the value of the currency. So on the other hand, if you have an inflationary unraveling that is more gradual,
00:45:55
Speaker
that maybe spans a period of 10 years, like we had in the United States in the 1940s, in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, in the UK in the 1930s, in the US in the 1970s. Well, in these circumstances, the stock market might collapse.
00:46:18
Speaker
It might go into a bear market. We haven't seen a serious bear market in the last 40 years. And people always think that the bear market is like a 20, 30, 50% correction. No, a bear market can be a 90% correction. And it might take 20 or 30 years for asset prices to come back where they were.
Financial Survival Advice
00:46:47
Speaker
Japanese stock market went into a bear market in 1990. It peaked exactly on the last day of 1989. From there, it collapsed by 82%. And it's still about 30% below the peak value from 1989. So that's a bear market. And so if you're just long stocks and bonds, you might take a huge loss and it might
00:47:17
Speaker
not even recover within your lifetime. So how it's going to play out, whether it's going to be one of those explosive episodes of inflation and everything collapses in a very short order, which could be a year or two or three. Or it's going to be a longer brewing crisis that might be 10 or 15 years long. We don't know.
00:47:48
Speaker
Depending on that, scenarios might be different. And I don't have the answer to how it's going to go. I believe that for economies like Japan and United Kingdom and probably Europe as well, we're probably looking at a fairly drastic crisis in the near future. United States might be able to finagle and kick the can down the road a bit further and maybe have
00:48:16
Speaker
somewhat softer landing than Europe, Japan, the UK. But, you know, time will tell and we'll find out. Yeah. I'm actually quite curious. Would you mind telling me what the Yugoslav war was like for you, kind of from your perspective?
00:48:43
Speaker
It was bizarre in some ways because, first and foremost, practically up until a few days before the war broke out, I think that most of us thought that it was impossible. We all thought, no way, no way could a war break out. Because, you know, people of Yugoslavia were
00:49:12
Speaker
culturally, even ethnically, and as families that were very, very intertwined. I'm a child of a mixed marriage. My father is Croatian and my mother is Serbian. And there were many people like that, you know. Mixed between different nationalities, you know, we had,
00:49:40
Speaker
We had Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Muslims all mixed in the same community. And we didn't really know who was who and nobody cared so much. And to think that all these people might turn against each other and go to war was a very difficult leap of imagination. So I thought that it wouldn't... How old were you roughly? Sorry? How old were you roughly?
00:50:10
Speaker
At the time when the war broke out, I was 21 years old. Okay, but I lived abroad. I lived abroad. I mean, I was visiting often, but I lived in Switzerland at the time. Okay. And this is why, you know, okay, and then and then and then war took off, you know, war broke out. And then, you know, for for the next few years,
00:50:39
Speaker
It was ugly. The war in Croatia lasted between 1991 and 1995. But it wasn't the same intensity the whole time. So it was really ugly in 1991 and 1992. And then things, you know, the conflict kind of froze up.
00:51:01
Speaker
It was like a stalemate. 35% of Croatia was still occupied by the Serbian, Yugoslavian forces, whatever. And then we had the big push to liberate these areas in 1995. So those were the two periods of big, big fighting. I think we lost about 10,000 troops.
00:51:27
Speaker
But generally life went on, you know, people went to work, children went to school, the economy chugged along, people built houses, you know, life life was just, I'm not gonna say normal, but a lot of aspects of normal life just continued. And this is pretty much, I think the case with with all wars and every word, but the
00:51:57
Speaker
the thing that I only started to appreciate much, much later in my life. Because, you know, when you're in war, you're not necessarily aware of the broader context in which this war is happening. And I think the best way to think of it is the metaphor that I heard from David Attenborough. And he said that
00:52:26
Speaker
If you put 100 red ants and 100 black ants into a glass jar and you observe what happens, nothing happens. Yeah. But then if you take that glass jar and you shake it up violently, then the ants start fighting each other and killing each other.
00:52:49
Speaker
Right. And as far as the answer concerned, you know, some, some emergency happened. They got agitated. They got very scared. They get very scared. And then they lash out against the other because they, they can't explain this emergency otherwise than the presence of the other. Right. Whereas somebody shook up the jar.
00:53:14
Speaker
You know, in the broader context of this conflict is that somebody shook up the jar. And very, what we now know, what we now know for sure is that somebody shook up the Yugoslav jar. Not only that, but you know, like they had agent provocateurs working to raise tensions, to induce fear.
00:53:43
Speaker
among the peoples of Yugoslavia to say that, oh, you know, the Croats will, you know, slaughter the Serbs. And so the Serbs felt afraid and they started creating barricades on the roads and blocking traffic and repelling when Croatia seceded and became an independent nation.
00:54:08
Speaker
And this was going on among all the peoples, but it was done deliberately. It wasn't like in the Western press, at the time you would have read about the centuries of hatreds between the different peoples of Yugoslavia and this irrational inclination to violence. And everybody thought of us as inferior barbarians who were violent.
00:54:38
Speaker
who were ready to go to war on any small pretext because they just can't keep this hatred of the other side bottled up any longer. But this is not how it happened. This is not at all the truth that the conflict was deliberately triggered and deliberately orchestrated. And the people were simply manipulated into falling into these hostilities out of fear. Again, back then,
00:55:07
Speaker
In the late 80s and early 90s, we didn't have the internet. So we were still being manipulated by the information disseminated from central sources. And it worked. I feel that today it isn't working. Today we are being encouraged to hate and loathe the Russians and to be ready to go to war against Russia.
00:55:33
Speaker
But people are not feeling it.
Debunking AI Threat Myths
00:55:36
Speaker
And if you look at the informal polls that are appearing in the social media, you see that actually even in the West where Russia has been demonized systematically for two decades now and where censorship is really heavy handed and all the Russian sources have been taken off the air and blocked.
00:55:59
Speaker
the majority of people in Europe sympathize with the Russian side. They may be the silent majority because they don't know that they're the majority. But it's something like between 70 and 80% of the people sympathize with the Russian side. And even in the NATO, they understand this. A friend who works
00:56:25
Speaker
four NATO in one of the NATO member nations wrote to me and she said that NATO was paying close attention to the public sentiment with regards to war in Ukraine and she told me that all the Eastern European countries and countries in the Balkans are about three out of four sympathized with the Russian side
00:56:48
Speaker
And then countries like Spain, France, Italy, Austria, it's about two out of three. So that's like large majority of people actually favor Russia.
00:57:03
Speaker
But, you know, there's hysteria going on. All the legacy media and all the public figures cannot, you know, it would be business suicide, career suicide to state this out in the open. But that's the reality. And, you know, that's how people feel. That's what they think. And so the consequence is that everybody is extremely reluctant to be hyped up for
00:57:32
Speaker
the big World War II or III. So, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic that it's not going to be as bad as it might be otherwise.
00:57:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if you take any amount of people off the street and ask them, do you support war, which is legalized murder of your fellow man, woman and 52 other genders, who the hell would?
00:58:04
Speaker
Who the hell would support it? It can only happen through manipulation, through the use of first fear or traumatic events, fear, and then agitation of the masses. That's the only way. That's how thousands and thousands of American kids got shipped off to the Middle East to
00:58:34
Speaker
Basically, they're brothers and sisters, because at the core of it, we are just brothers and sisters. We're like a large clan here on Earth.
00:58:50
Speaker
It is it is really it's like the Wizard of Oz, you know, like, you know, people like like you and me, we know enough to you can see through the bullshit. And with a little bit of education, most people can start to to think a little bit more critically about, you know, new events. The problem is, I believe one of the problems that we're faced with is these guys, you know, covid was the
00:59:20
Speaker
Well, not the opening salvo, but for this, let's say, chapter, that was the opening salvo. And you can bet that they have other tricks up there, Steve. So we can't really get complacent and start thinking, it's going to be okay. Even if it's okay in the end, I think there will be a lot of
00:59:42
Speaker
to mount along the way. And it's possible that many will not make it on the other side. But I do like your optimism, Alex. I know you're a little bit after a trip, so I don't want to keep you for much longer. I just wanted to ask you one final couple of questions. I know you're kind of
01:00:09
Speaker
from previous interviews that I've listened of you, I know your stance on AI and when I heard you the first time talk about AI and how powerful it can get, I'm like, I told you, this guy gets it. Maybe you can elaborate what your stance is on AI to the folks, but what I would like you to
01:00:36
Speaker
Potentially also discusses chat GPT so actually chat GPT every time I try to logo to a couple of two or three times on it it will it always tells me it's at capacity while someone else is allowed to use it like on the other side of the phone like someone I was working with.
01:00:55
Speaker
was using it i'm like dude it's not letting me on so it's probably because i'm using brave browser with a vpn and whatever it's like i can't i can't tell who you are pleb therefore you're not allowed to use me but um tell me what do you think is this uh the goal of this uh chat gpt now and
01:01:12
Speaker
Tell the listeners who are worried that the AI is going to turn us into batteries and take over the world and all that good stuff, maybe allay some of those concerns if you think that is indeed the case. The reason why I get it is because I spent many years in my life running an AI development project. I'm not a software programmer, but I work with
01:01:41
Speaker
with a team of researchers and software engineers on an AI solution, in my case to the problem of market speculation, right? And what I learned through that project is how extraordinarily difficult it is to put together something that actually functions correctly and reliably in accordance with your specifications and does what you intended to do.
01:02:09
Speaker
And the program that we developed is a form of AI. And, you know, we have to be careful about understanding that when they say artificial intelligence, it's mostly artificial, it's much less intelligence. And, you know, if you want to get deeper into it, you have to even try to figure out what do we mean by intelligence. So today's
01:02:35
Speaker
AI applications are very impressive when you're talking about language models. So simple things like spelling, more complex things like grammar, the tools are phenomenal.
01:02:57
Speaker
even fetching you answers to questions, very impressive, but it's all based on language, right? It's all language-based. What it is actually is not really intelligence, it's these massive if-then-else loops that then link to database tables which are generated
Challenges in AI Development
01:03:26
Speaker
You could automatically generate a database table of certain types of value, collect massive amounts of data into that table of a similar kind, develop a distribution curve of how frequently certain results
01:03:44
Speaker
happen or how infrequently they happen, you can calculate the most likely result, and then you can say, well, it's probably this. And in most cases, it's going to be turning out to be correct.
01:03:58
Speaker
But you'll also notice that when it comes to visual analysis, right, that you take a picture and you have to work out what's in the picture, it's much more difficult, particularly when the picture is moving. If it's still not bad, if it's a moving picture, it's much, much more difficult. And I have to say, to be fair, they've developed very impressive applications that can look at the film
01:04:28
Speaker
through a camera and detect what's in the film. This is extremely difficult. I don't know if people understand what stereograms are. Stereograms where these printed blotches, these images that seem to
01:04:46
Speaker
It seems like there's nothing, just like a blotch, but there's actually a pattern in it. And so now bear with me because this is kind of important as a distinction between actual intelligence and artificial kind. So I don't know, 20, 30 years ago, these stereograms became very, very popular because what you could do is you could take a stereogram, right? You could look at it
01:05:15
Speaker
in a certain way, and out of this unintelligible blotch, a 3D image would pop up, right? And it's quite an incredible experience because it's like, oh my god, you know, there's a picture of a ball in here or whatever. How could that possibly be? So basically, what happens in your brain, completely outside of your awareness, is that
01:05:44
Speaker
When you stare at that image and you even have to stare so that it's slightly out of focus, right? When you stare at that image, your brain automatically identifies that there's a pattern in this blotch. Even this first step would be extremely difficult for a software program to accomplish. So your brain finds a pattern.
01:06:14
Speaker
Then next, it makes the guess that if I see a pattern here, the pattern should be uniform everywhere, but it's interrupted in certain places, right? Because that's what stereograms are. It's a pattern that's difficult to tell like when you're looking at it normally, but the pattern is in there and it's interrupted in certain places. So like, let's say a certain dot is skipped.
01:06:42
Speaker
in some places. And then your brain makes the next guess, like, why is this pattern interrupted in certain places? And then it makes the guess, huh, maybe because part of the picture is at a different plane. So when I look at it, this closer part of the image covers up the farther part of the image. So
01:07:09
Speaker
Even though the pattern is continuous and intact, I can't see part of it because this part of the image is at a higher plane. And at that moment, this part of the image pops out like it's in 3D. Of course, it's not in 3D. Your brain creates this illusion. But the way it creates this illusion is the result of real intelligence because not only did it identify a pattern in the image, but then it also made a guess
01:07:39
Speaker
first, that the pattern is fully intact and uninterrupted. And then it made the next guess that the reason why it appears interrupted in some places is because it's actually a 3D image, not a 2D image. And then the part of the image covers the bits of the pattern that you don't see. Okay. That's real intelligence. It would be impossible
01:08:09
Speaker
for a computer program to just pull up these gases out of thin air. These sorts of hypotheses would have to be hardwired into a program. Otherwise, the computer could never create a 3D image. Now, that's stereograms, okay? It's a trick thing that taught us very important lessons about the way our brains work.
01:08:38
Speaker
But the fact is that our brains analyze patterns in the world around us and
01:08:50
Speaker
generate hypotheses and guesses about what we're perceiving absolutely all the time. It's not obvious to us because like with the stereograms, it happens in the background, it happens outside of our conscious awareness. When you look at the stereograms, it's not like you can hear your brain generate language that says like, oh, let's see, we have a pattern here. Hmm, and why is this better? You don't perceive any of this. You don't hear this.
01:09:19
Speaker
thought process. Your brain just gives you the solution and that solution is produced with real actual organic intelligence. This kind of intelligence is not available to computers because they have nowhere to
01:09:36
Speaker
draw these hypotheses from. And in fact, the way we formulate hypotheses, even consciously, let alone unconsciously, is a great mystery. It's difficult to explain. It's part of our consciousness, which is what science calls the difficult problem, because they have no idea how to explain it, where it comes from, what it is. It's just there. And that's part of real intelligence. And, you know, the
01:10:02
Speaker
The difference between real intelligence and artificial intelligence is an unbridgeable gap at the moment. And it will probably always be an unbridgeable gap. OK. Having settled that, long story. But there's another reason why I'm not too concerned with artificial intelligence. So suppose you put together a very, very sophisticated program that even was very good at analyzing visual content and real time moving pictures and so forth.
01:10:33
Speaker
you still need massive databases where all this information is stored. These databases have to be available for analysis in the real time. You need sensors that function flawlessly. You need a connection between inputs and outputs that function reliably and flawlessly.
01:10:58
Speaker
You need maintenance because it's not like once you put together a software program, as you know, that it just magically functions
Criticism of Imposed Tech Solutions
01:11:05
Speaker
forever. Maybe the operating system changes. There's an upgrade to the operating system. Now nothing works. Now you have to get the developers again to fix the bug. This is nonstop process. This never stops. All the software is written in code.
01:11:24
Speaker
reading code and understanding what you're reading is a very highly advanced skill that not everybody has. If people are sloppy about documenting their codes, even the developers themselves who wrote the code
01:11:41
Speaker
you know, few weeks later might not even remember what the hell was I remember, right? Yeah. So the maintenance of these of these products is a difficult problem. And I think that the more complex the application, the more difficult the maintenance is. And, you know, this is not this is not publicized widely, but many, many, many software projects ultimately fail, even if they even if they were built with
01:12:11
Speaker
infinite resources and even if they're You know like even if people who are running them have access to all the you know Take take metaverse so metaverse has been one of the very important projects for the for these globalists because you know like they want us they want us bend into place in 15-minute city cities to to live our full lives in this metaverse and
01:12:41
Speaker
So Facebook, Meta, they started this project already many years ago and they decided that the outset that they needed a special operating system to make this work. And so they started, they hired a large team of developers, I think like 100 or 150 developers to create a brand new specialized operating system on top of which the Metaverse would be programmed.
01:13:12
Speaker
Well, that project failed completely. Facebook fired all of these developers, scrapped the thing completely, and then decided that they were gonna try to build metaverse on Google's operating system. Is it gonna work out? I don't know, but it's hard. It's not just, people imagine you just get these genius programmers and they just build you whatever you like.
01:13:39
Speaker
It's not like that. We see the F-35 fighter jet, trillion dollars in development. They're in a morass of software problems, which are the chief reason why the whole project is failing. The British intelligence agencies all wanted to, some years ago, integrate their databases so that what MI5 collects
01:14:08
Speaker
was available to MI6 and GCHQ and whoever. That project went on for several years. They spent, I think, something like 150 million pounds on it. They scrapped the whole thing altogether, and then they started anew. That happened. So, AI in the form of Skynet,
01:14:36
Speaker
The kind of AI that they're trying to scare the daylads out of everybody with is probably never going to exist. It might be a hodgepodge of patches and projects and applications with limited scope, and some of it will be impressive looking, but Skynet's not coming anytime soon.
01:15:02
Speaker
I think the funniest and most brilliant example of this is a couple of years ago, they had some places where you had the QR code and you had to scan it with the app.
01:15:18
Speaker
in order to be allowed entry or whatever else. And people were like, thwart this bullshit, just take a permanent marker and just draw a little tiny little square in one of the white spaces on the QR code. The whole thing fucking falls apart. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's a fantastic point because very often these very high tech solutions
01:15:47
Speaker
are extremely fragile and vulnerable to very low tech sabotage solutions, you know, like, I don't know if people see these general dynamics, robot dogs, and now you know, they're mounting guns on them. So these dogs are going to go around shooting people. Well, guess what, you know, like you can probably
01:16:09
Speaker
You could probably disable the robot dog with a blanket or a net or, or, or, or a bucket. And then the whole thing, trash bag, bro. Exactly. A plastic trash. Very often, you know, the, the, they're trying to create this mystique of these incredible things that are coming and we're just going to be completely helpless victims and they're going to be, you know, Yeah.
01:16:38
Speaker
doing whatever they want with this AI stuff, that's not going to happen. It's not like that. And I also heard with regards to QR codes how during the thick of the pandemic, in New York when they developed these vaccine passes, the New York City created one solution
01:17:07
Speaker
And the New York state created a different solution, which caused a complete mayhem with like, you know, like you had QR code issued by one authority that wouldn't be recognized by sensors that read, you know, reported to the other authority. So it was a complete mess. So, you know, again, developing technologies, it's a very, very delicate business. You have to start off with a very, very clear
01:17:34
Speaker
plan and statement of purpose. All your developers have to clearly understand the statement of purpose. Then you have to develop very, very detailed specifications and all of this. It's not being done.
01:17:50
Speaker
You know what you really need as well? You need your product or service to have demand. If you're trying to communist style, fascist style, top-down dictate things,
01:18:09
Speaker
It's going to lead to one set of outcomes. For example, the Metaverse bullshit project. The reason it's failing is because, Mark, nobody asked for this. Not one person asked for it.
01:18:24
Speaker
But what are we asking for? We are asking for convenience when it comes to our groceries or our fast food. That's why there's many successful companies out there that are doing it really well. You got your door dashes in the States and all this other stuff in Uber Eats. There's a demand, so that works. When it comes to the government using
01:18:50
Speaker
misappropriating funds that they pretty much stole. There's no incentive to provide a good service. There's no demand. So there's all the kind of free market variables missing. And of course, these projects, they become overly complicated.
01:19:06
Speaker
overly complex and they're bound to fail. It's complex and as much as they think they can lock down the grip with as much as they can use, I don't even think it should be called artificial intelligence. I think the less sexy name is more appropriate, machine learning.
01:19:22
Speaker
because machines can and like you brilliantly put it they can store data in databases and they can use algorithms to analyze that and categorize that data and make decisions based on convoluted if-then-else statements not much else they can't perceive correct like you say they don't they don't have divine inspiration which is a human can tap into and a bunch of other things consciousness is a part of
01:19:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right and I think you're also making an excellent point that nobody asked for this.
Podcasting and the Future of AI
01:19:53
Speaker
These are solutions that nobody needs, nobody wants and they're being forced down on us to suit somebody else's desires and things like that generally don't catch on and don't work and people just, you know,
01:20:09
Speaker
We don't even have to watch them fail because people ultimately will just migrate towards solutions that they actually do want and that do help make their lives better. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Alex.
01:20:30
Speaker
I really appreciate you coming on. I love the breadth and the depth of your ability to take pretty much any subject and go as deep and as wide as desired. Before we wrap up, please let basically the listeners know what your main channels of where they can connect with you on the internet are, please.
01:20:58
Speaker
Yeah, well, I have a few. The easiest, I think, is Twitter. My handle is at nakedhegy. Then I have a sub-stack called Alex Craner's Trent Compass. I have a blog called The Naked Hegy, right? I have a YouTube channel where unfortunately I don't post so much because I've discovered that YouTube is a lot of work. Doing video content is a job.
01:21:27
Speaker
It's part of my 2023 New Year's resolution to produce more video content. So far, I haven't gotten around to it. Yeah, my video channel is called Markets, Trends and Profits. And I also have for people who are more interested in things like trading and investing and commodities markets and so forth, I have a professional website called iSystemtrendfollowing.
01:21:56
Speaker
And yeah, that's basically it. We have all those in the description. I recommend folks check out, subscribe to the sub stack. Some really good articles coming out there from Alex. One question though, why don't you have a podcast bro? Like, come on, come on. Yeah, I asked myself the same question, Chris. I think that very honestly,
01:22:25
Speaker
I will have to petition for a 48 hour day. I'm trained. There are many things to do. In addition to all this, I have a day job. Well, it's not a job job. I'm like an independent.
01:22:45
Speaker
artist but I do have artists well artists artisan whatever you know like I have a you know like I've almost kind of diverged between because you know like I started off all this as a as a
01:23:03
Speaker
as a former hedge fund manager, you know, like I started producing a market newsletter. It's just that, you know, like these, all these events, the pandemic, the war and everything kind of diverted my attention because I reckon, what's the point of all these nice trades and profits if we all end up in some dystopian nightmare of a future where we will own nothing and be unhappy. So, yeah.
01:23:33
Speaker
You know, a lot of what I produce now, a lot of what I write about is not really even related to markets and commodities trading. But I think it's nevertheless relevant to the challenges that we're facing, which include, you know, like trading, managing your portfolio is legitimate because they do want us to own nothing and we are under attack and inflation is a serious problem for everybody.
01:24:00
Speaker
So that's that's part of where I focus my attention. The other part of where I focus my attention are all these social changes and economic changes and geopolitical changes that are taking place that are going to have a massive impact on what the future of our societies is going to look like. Yeah. And yeah, podcasting would definitely be an important part of it that, you know,
01:24:25
Speaker
activism if you want to call it that. But, you know, there's only so many hours in the day. I completely get you. So here's your two solutions. You just divide every hour by two, you boom, have doubled your hours. Okay. Easy solution there.
01:24:45
Speaker
And the other, listen, listen to this now. Yesterday, I woke up at about five in the morning, sometimes wake up at like between three and five a.m. for whatever reason. So it's my quiet time. So yesterday, I got my coffee. I have a red LED light therapy lamp. So I'm shining my back.
01:25:05
Speaker
in my underwear on a little stool and I recorded a 42-minute episode on how Autoimmune develops in my underwear sipping on my coffee.
01:25:22
Speaker
That's how easy podcasting can be. And if you need, if you want, I can help you get set up fast. Just let me know. Listen, I'm glad you said that and I'll, I'll take you up on that. That's brilliant. But like, you know, like when we're, when we're on that, you're like, why not divide your hours in the day by four, then you multiply them. Then you quadruple your, your hours.
01:25:48
Speaker
Because this isn't some magical fairy tale land here, bro, that we're at. Okay, you can't be unreasonable. You can't be unreasonable with your requests like that. Come on.
01:26:00
Speaker
Okay. I like that. I like that. That's, uh, that's lucid. That's funny. All right. Uh, all right, guys, uh, thank you so much for tuning in to the podcast. Check out again, check out, uh, Alex's blog, the naked hedgy link below, subscribe to his sub stack. The link will be below really, really good information there.
01:26:21
Speaker
I'll have links to his other stuff, of course, some good videos on his channel related to trading, trend following, and just markets and economics and stuff like that. Alex Crainer, you're always welcome back on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today, bro. Always with pleasure, Chris, and until the next happy occasion.