As someone who was/is in the circus world as well as software development, there are certain things that you can never learn without having access to the right people.
In circus, I had to travel to specific cities and work with specific coaches and pay them quite a premium to get access to the information that they knew - there is literally no alternative once you get to a high enough level.
My thoughts on the finance and geopolitics space is that there are some alternatives to the podcasts listed here, but they are really hard to find and aggregate and sort through all of the noise out there. I consider that a valuable enough service that I'm willing to pay and subscribe to the podcasts. I was also previously a subscriber to Lyn Alden's premium research service.
I like hearing what smart people have to say and I don't subscribe for "stock picks", so I'm not sure exactly why you would call this grift. It is a research service and almost like an auditory journal (is the Economist a grift too? the Financial Times?)
It relies on what articles particularily. There was an article about the advancement of AI in China after chinese researchers build a langage model able to produce some poetry in chinese. Since that model was build 1 1/2 years after an equivalent model in english by us computer engineers, the author of the article concluded China was far behind in matter of AI developement and there was nothing to be afraid of... What ???
No related to financial press chanel, I have just watched a documentary comparing development of big chains of grocery stores in the EU (carrefour, intermarche, and so on), US (amazon fresh), and some large Chinese grocery stores chain (with its vertical integration). The chinese stores chain is clearly ahead of amazon fresh, which is itself clearly ahead of EU stores. In China, AI is everywhere in the supply chain, from automatic surveillance (camera and microphone) of pigs elevage to detect disease at very early sign, to automatic delivery through self-driving car. Everywhere were they can save a buck or reduce production cost.
> Financial Times
Financial Times produced a ton of articles about crypto, and I would be very curious to knows what were their incentives for a big chunk of them... 'Lunch with ~Ponzi~ SBF' is still a subject of ridicule amongst it readers.
Beside, I buy sometimes the paper version, and once I encoutered a tiny ad about a business with no name active in 30 countries looking for partners with a gmail address for contact... Did it sound legit to the guy who accepted to put the ad in the printed version ?
Pass.