Who the Hell Is Alex Joonto?

Alex Joonto, born Alessandro Giuntini, is a blogger, author, crypto enthusiast, and proud SwissBorg employee.

He currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal, where he arrived in 2022, after globetrotting for 6 months. This journey saw Alex searching for a new home, after 10 years spent on the island of Malta, where he used to work at PokerStarts, the popular online poker room.

On July 2021, he left the company where he worked for 5 wonderful years. The reasons for this bold move included burn-out, a desire of traveling and mostly, understanding what to do with his life. Since then, Alex's biggest motivation has been to complete and publish "Thank You, President Corona!"

This dream became true in June 2023, marking the entrance of Alex Joonto into the international non-fiction literature scene.

OK, enough with talking about myself in the third person. I believe that only narcissists and psychos talk about themselves in the third person.

I can tell you that I love writing, which is indeed one of my biggest passions, but I’d bore you. Yes, “Thank You, President Corona!” is my first book ever. I had always wanted to publish a book, but my intentions punctually succumbed to laziness.

In my life, I’ve always been good at starting 100 things, without completing a single one. This pattern is finally changing. I’m slowly becoming a guy who gets things done, and this book was lucky enough to get touched by this new attitude of mine. Working with a therapist really pays off!

My Origins

I was born in Italy, a place many folks dream to live in, but I tell you that every-day life Italy is nothing like you can imagine. No, people don’t eat pizza and pasta all the time, nor do they necessarily move their hands and talk loud. When they talk loud is to sod you off, not to entertain you. Italy’s national sport is to complain, about everything, while ranting about how there is no future, and if there is any future, it is going to be dark. I’ve always felt this negative mentality as a matrix, a matrix against which I’ve always felt compelled to break away from. Let’s say that in the middle of those depressed bullock fucks, I’ve trained myself to look at the positive side, even in the direst situations, even when nobody else believes in the bright side.

You can tell that my youth was quite lonely. When you don’t stick to the status quo, the other kids will oust you. Fuck them! Cats were my real friends, the best teachers one can have! Cats taught me manners, politeness, and cleanliness, but mostly, they taught me empathy. When you manage to speak another species’ language and to understand what goes through the mind of a feline, you can walk in everyone’s shoes.

Two other important friends of mine have always been history and science. Since I was a kid, I was stuck with stuff like Discovery Channel and other scientific and historical documentaries. If it wasn’t that, I used to devour scientific magazines, and when the internet came, I began to surf the web in search of knowledge. Science gave me the gift of true critical thinking: “Do you think to be right, or you WANT to be right? How do you know your are right? Test your theory first! Try everything to destroy it! If it survives, you might well be right!”

History taught me what happens when you give yourself up to blind anger and consider ignorance as bliss.

Yeah, of course I had human friends too! But they never really understood me. I think they tried for a good while, until they gave up. For them, I was an alien from another planet.

My human relationships got a turn only in 2012, when I was 22 and moved to Malta. In Italy, I had lost my job as a technical writer. What is a technical writer? It is the guy who writes instruction manuals, so yeah, in a sense, I’ve already written some books, though manuals are the books nobody wants to read. My potential audience was made of operators working with machines to carve wood, metal, or even marble (to make tombstones!).

The Island That Changed My Life

Back to Malta, I moved to that little Mediterranean island in search of fortune. They said it was full of opportunities, even for those who had no idea of what to do in life. Well, once landed there, I got an internship in the renewable energy sector (the hot topic back then), and later I got the desk of mathematics and science teacher in a private secondary school! My model for this role? I immediately thought about Bradley Cooper in The Hangover. Just a bit cooler… and drunker!

My adventure as a teacher lasted just one school year, after which I was seduced by the dark side of the island, built around the online gambling industry. In this industry, everything looks easy: the job itself, building relationships, making friends, getting laid, and partying all the time. Living in Malta feels like a never-ending holiday. If you can’t handle it, you will be sucked in very fast. I’ve seen people landing with a broad smile, leaving the island after a couple of years with dark circles due to who knows what kind of druggy shit and wild lifestyle they had. In Malta, nothing is real, yet everything is true. Be careful with what you wish for.

I don’t know how I survived 10 years there, but I did, and I must confess, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out just when I needed the most. It was my personal Great Reset! I couldn’t cope anymore with an environment where I knew everyone, and everyone knew me! I was turning crazy. I needed time for myself, time to think over my life, time to write down my memoirs, time to work on myself, and even time to draw an escape plan. I needed to escape from what had become Alcatraz!

Well, it seems I escaped Alcatraz eventually! Against all the odds, I made my move out, when every escape attempt I tried over these 10 years failed miserably. How did I do it? I just resigned from PokerStars, a company for which everyone dreams of working for, and started traveling around Europe to find a new place to live in. My wanderlust brought me to Lisbon. Why Lisbon? Because it is the rising capital of the blockchain revolution! It is the perfect place for a crypto nerd like me! And unlike in Dubai (the fake blockchain capital), in Lisbon you have history, you have the most elegant architecture that keeps you company while you taste delicacies of any kind! I love Portugal, and I think you will find me here for a good while! I couldn’t find a better place from where to launch Thank You, President Corona!

During the Night, and During the Day

If during the night I’m a writer, during the day I work for a fintech company called SwissBorg. We aim at democratising wealth management, starting with crypto. We believe that everyone should have access to tools and knowledge to make their wealth grow, because that’s what marks the difference between the poor and the rich: the poor work for money, the rich make money work for them. We want to help the poor to make their money to work for them, no matter how little it is.

Incidentally, working in crypto gave me the chance to hustle as a content writer too. I’m currently helping web3 startups with building their content narrative, their landing pages, and even their documentation, such as white papers, gitbooks, and pitch decks.

If you feel the need to give your startup project a professional, yet intriguing and catchy look, I will be happy to help you! Hit me on LinkedIn, and we will see how I can help your vision to get a convincing voice!