If you follow the various financial advisers and commentators on YouTube, you can't help but notice that a guy called Clif High gets interviewed a lot.
He's the creator of a web bot that mines and analyzes keyword use on the internet to form predictions about future events. He created the bot in 1997. He terms this process "predictive linguistics".
Whenever he's introduced, great play is made of his alleged time at Microsoft as one of their top software troubleshooters. For someone with such a high (no pun intended) profile being interviewed on various YouTube channels, there's no information, background or history online about him to back up these assertions.
He has a website called Half Past Human. Given that he's supposedly a top-notch programmer and that he uses that website to sell his monthly report of predicted upcoming events, it's a very poorly designed site. That doesn't reflect well on his programming abilities. But maybe all his time is spent tweaking his bot.
Initially I was intrigued by what he had to say because he was saying things I wanted to hear - that Bitcoin would eventually go to the Moon and precious metals would follow suit, if not to the same extent.
He started to lose me when declaring that all people are psychic, even though they don't know it, and that the precognition that many of us unknowingly have, plays into the keywords we use when searching for stuff on the internet.
Clif is able to filter and correlate such info and interpret trends as suggesting that certain events will occur in the near to medium future.
Talk of chemtrails, that climate change leading to a warmer world is wrong (he thinks we're headed into a new Ice Age) and that the Sun is not a nuclear furnace, all served to undermine any credibility that remained.
He's a loon as far as I can see. But one a lot of people are giving airtime to.
His bot's had alleged predictive successes such as the Northeast Blackout of 2003, 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the Hurricane Katrina and its devastation.
However, his bot (or his interpretations of it's data) resulted in some major predictions that completely missed the mark like predicting a cataclysm that would devastate the planet on 21 December 2012, possibly a reversing of Earth's magnetic poles or a small series of nuclear attacks leading up to a major attack during the year.
We all know neither of those happened.
Another of his bot's predictions was that a massive earthquake would occur in December 2008 in Vancouver, Canada and the Pacific Northwest.
Again, no such event happened.
Yet another predictive misfire was that the US dollar would completely collapse in 2011, and that Israel would bomb Iran, with the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama being thrown into major chaos.
So not a strong record of accurate predictions. By chance alone, he'll get some things right. And that might just be enough for him to coast on for those whose world view is confirmed by what High has to say.
You be the judge. What's your take on him?
Here's a typical interview...
