In finance, knowing who to trust, as there literally are hundreds of TikTokers, YouTubers and self-proclaimed experts doling out financial guidance online, can be a painstaking task. In fact, if we extend this conundrum to the realm of science and politics, knowing who to believe and dismiss can be a monumental task. But understanding who to trust is the one endeavor that can literally determine whether you attain a high quality of life versus a poor one.
Because I’ve been asked this question so many times, I finally decided to address how to solve this conundrum in the above podcast. I break down the relevant process to do so all in the above podcast, so ensure you listen to the podcast to receive the most vital information. Trusting the wrong “experts” can lead to consumption of such drugs like Vioxx that is believed to have killed half a million people due to those 500,000 people placing blind faith and trust in self-anointed expert agencies that deemed Vioxx as safe to consume. However, the experts that often make the designations for drugs that will decide whether you live or die are often more beholden to the pharmaceutical industry than consumer safety, a fact easily extrapolated from the revolving door between regulatory agencies and pharmaceutical companies in this industry.
In finance, one should never trust experts in non-related finance fields in financial matters, like Mark Cuban when he peddled Titan coin and the Voyager crypto platform, Kevin O’Leary about his strong endorsements for BTC to smaller cryptocurrencies like Solana (SOL) and Serum (SRM) that all subsequently crashed in price, or half a dozen or more finance “expert” YouTubers that all peddled the FTX platform and BTC at more than $50,000 to their millions of followers. Trusting non-subject matter experts for their guidance and advice in subjects outside their area of expertise can, and will lead to life-altering financial statuses, but unfortunately, as millions discovered, in a massively negative manner versus in a positive manner.
Of course, no one can never know with 100% confidence that anyone that provides financial, scientific or political guidance will be correct in their assessment. But as I always state in my provided investment opinions, I only look to buy assets when prices have dropped sufficiently to the point where my two decades of experience in these assets identify them as low-risk, high-reward assets. And knowing who to trust when it comes to life-altering decisions about health and finance can be made under the same paradigm of low-risk, high-reward. One merely needs a concrete process to do so, which I explain in the above podcast. If one has a concrete process when to weed out the pretenders from the real experts, then the chance of making right decisions literally skyrocket in matters of finance as well as matters of health that can decide a future high quality of life versus a future debilitating quality of life.
Many people that position themselves as experts with hardly any empirical experience in their so-called field of expertise are really only clever expert marketers that understand the realm of emotional marketing in which they either sell their customers on the emotions of fear or greed to capture their business. This is especially true in the realm of investing as FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is often a tactic used to bait customers into terrible investments and a marketed greed of hollow promises of “easy, quick money” is a favorite tactic often used by those that position themselves as finance experts to bait their customers into making terrible investments. While quick money certainly applied to many crypto investors that were lucky in getting in at the right time, these investors often marketed FOMO to bait many investors into bitcoin at above $40 -$50,000 prices that created huge losses within the past year for green crypto investors that didn’t understand the market.
As I’ve repeatedly stated on this platform, I don’t consider myself a BTC or crypto expert, and I don’t even believe that one should necessarily follow all my BTC predictions as I can only be a subject matter in a limited amount of subjects due to the fact that one man only has so many hours in his day to conduct research and analysis. However, as I predicted the exact top of BTC prices at the end of 2017 at $20,000 and predicted a crash to $5,000 in 2018 (it bottomed at $3,000) and predicted a BTC top of $66,000 at the end of 2021 (it topped at $69,000) and another subsequent crash after this top, one better insure that if a dabbler in BTC analysis like myself was able to see both crashes coming from a mile away, that any expert you follow better have predicted both crashes before they happened, at a bare minimum.
I have often stated that to truly learn real wealth building investment strategies, one has to remain unemotional and to not panic when asset prices drop and to not hold on to assets too long when asset prices soar. Mistakes of being down 35% or more in one’s overall portfolio performance, or once being up 70% and losing nearly all profits, only happen when one is being driven by emotion instead of solid investment strategies. And if you follow the wrong analysts, you likely are making choices driven by emotion instead of the much wiser strategy of emotional separation from your investments that allows one to make more robust, unemotional decisions.
The ruling class has also made generous use of fear is to manipulate behavior that has nothing to do with finance and investing, such as the use of irrational fear during Covid lockdowns to manipulate millions of people worldwide into executing reprehensible behavior that served their purpose. During Covid lockdowns, millions of people with zero scientific background, either academically or professionally, insisted they knew the truth about viral transmission and danger in direct opposition to the correct beliefs of those that really understand science, and therefore reprehensibly treated anyone that disagreed with them regarding mask-wearing and experimental mRNA drug receiving behavior. Furthermore, at times, such Ghosts in the Shell were quite violent in the manners in which they executed verbal and physical assault against educated and intelligent dissenters.
Finally, regarding influential podcasters like Joe Rogan, I don’t believe Joe Rogan has a malicious bone in his body, but one should never listen to endorsements of narratives from influential podcasters without a critical ear. I discuss in the above podcast Mr. Rogan’s endorsements of the beliefs of a couple of his podcast guests that have forwarded narratives that are clearly wrong. In some sense, Rogan’s loyalty in endorsing his podcast guest’s views as a consequence of his friendship with them is admirable as this displayed loyalty is indicative of his character to stick with people he considers friends through thick and thin. Had I been asked to comment on the opinions of people I consider to be close friends, I may have chosen loyalty over critical assessment of these opinions as well.
Furthermore, Mr. Rogan has even endorsed complete blank forgiveness of people that have exhibited extremely malicious behavior in the past. Though I endorse forgiveness as well, I don’t endorse blank forgiveness and believe that a person that acted in a vicious and malicious manner in the past towards others must redeem herself or himself and earn forgiveness. Some type of redemption is necessary to improve humanity. Otherwise, if we blankly grant forgiveness to the most malicious of people whose ideas that caused their malice were clearly wrong, such people will gladly continue to harm more people in the future after receiving forgiveness without redemption. In the end, many people make the mistake of blindly believing the endorsements of those that wield enormous influence in the realm of social media without applying any critical framework to these endorsements. Thus, we must always apply a critical ear to everything the greatest of social media influencers state.
In the above podcast, I provide a working critical thinking framework that should help everyone avoid such mistakes that have been a victim of any of the massive gaps in logic that lead one to blindly put their faith in people that clearly should not be trusted just because they have positioned themselves as “experts”. I will tell you how to separate the expert marketers that really have little applicable knowledge in the subject matters of which they speak and write from those that really are experts in their discussed fields. Listen to the above podcast and stop placing trust in the very people most capable of hollowing out your intellect to turn you into a Ghost in the Shell, extremely vulnerable to mass mind and behavior manipulation as I discussed in this article.
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