It&rsquo;s one of my most controversial podcasts ever.&nbsp;
Recently, I sat down with Martin Shkreli.
Most know the caricature: the smirking &ldquo;pharma bro&rdquo; who raised a drug price 5,000%, got arrested, went to prison, and never once apologized.
The "most hated man in America," as some in the media crowned him.
I've been on the receiving end of media backlash, though nothing close to what Martin experienced.
And I'll admit it got to me more than maybe it should have.
Martin was able to take the blows and turn them into a positive force in his life.
I asked him how he built that armor.
His answer: conviction.
Before I get into what he means by that&mdash;and how anyone can use it to eat the dragon and keep the fire&mdash;let&rsquo;s back up.
Because the version of Shkreli most people think they know is a headline, not a biography.
<h3>The Daraprim Story </h3>
Here's what happened that got him into hot water:
In 2015, through his company Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin acquired Daraprim, a drug treating toxoplasmosis.
Daraprim was an old, off-patent drug from the 1950s with no generic competition and minimal revenue, selling for $13 a pill.
Shkreli raised the price to $750&mdash;and the backlash was immediate.
But, he said, patients didn&rsquo;t pay that list price. Insurance did. Uninsured patients received the drug for free. No one went without treatment.
Also, the drug had been economically abandoned.
When a medicine generates trivial income, no one invests in monitoring resistance, upgrading manufacturing, or improving distribution. By raising the price, he could turn a neglected asset into a viable business with incentives for stewardship and oversight.
The outrage was selective.
Drugs priced at $1 million per treatment exist in the U.S. with far less public fury directed at their CEOs.
He argues that politicians (including Hillary Clinton) either misunderstood the reimbursement system or exploited public anger.
<h3>The Big Bad Wolf Effect</h3>
The government couldn't get Martin on the drug pricing&mdash;because there was nothing illegal about it.
Instead, in 2017 he was convicted on securities fraud and conspiracy charges tied to earlier hedge fund activities and his biotech company, Retrophin.
The drug pricing controversy made him infamous. The securities case sent him to prison.
Martin believes the two stories were not as separate as they appeared.
He points out that the Southern District of New York has one of the highest conviction rates in the country and argues that once someone becomes a national symbol&mdash;the &ldquo;Big Bad Wolf,&rdquo; as he calls it&mdash;incentives shift.
He chose to fight the charges rather than accept a plea.
<h3>What Prison Taught Him</h3>
Martin spent four years inside.
He rejected the idea that he &ldquo;lost&rdquo; years.
He read hundreds of biographies. He studied crypto. He got deep into software. He also spent real time growing closer to his father, who later died relatively young from heart problems.
"I wouldn't say I lost those four years," Martin told me. "I had a different four years."
That reframe is everything.
When he came out and joined a Twitter Space talking about crypto, some of the most famous investors were listening and asking each other: how does this guy know so much about our field after being locked up?
The answer: curious people never stop learning. Incarceration just removed the distractions.
<h3>Curiosity as a Superpower</h3>
Martin and I are working together right now on quantum and optical computing&mdash;fields neither of us trained in formally.
This discussion led to one of the best insights of the podcast.
His philosophy: you have to get into the weeds.
You have to be unafraid of the scary-sounding word, the intimidating equation, the field that seems impenetrable.
The second you say "let someone else handle the technical stuff," you've put artificial limits on your abilities.
Experts are essential&mdash;but you have to be able to have a real conversation with them, ask smart questions, figure out how to know when and if they're wrong.
Martin had a chemist on his team who was a postdoc under the only person to win two Nobel prizes in chemistry. He didn't try to out-chemist that guy. He just needed to understand enough to talk to him.
I shared my own version: six years of nightly stand-up comedy.
I never became a legendary comedian.
But the hours transferred&mdash;my public speaking got 1,000x better. The skill of learning transfers across domains.
That's the thing most miss.
<h3>The Value of Conviction</h3>
Shkreli was wrong about some things&mdash;he admitted as much.
His PR strategies backfired. His Twitter provocations had consequences.
Standing your ground works better when you're also occasionally strategic about how you stand it.
But for Shkreli, conviction is survival.
And it&rsquo;s as essential in business as it is in public life.
In investing, if you don&rsquo;t believe in your analysis, you panic at volatility and sell at the worst moment. In leadership, if you don&rsquo;t believe in your decision, you retreat at the first wave of criticism.
In controversy, if you don&rsquo;t have conviction, the mob will decide for you.
He said this:
At the end of the day, the label "most hated man in America" said more about the people who wrote it than about him.
Labels are mirrors. They reflect the storyteller first.
And the louder the label, the more you should question who benefits from it.
<a href="https://lnk.to/JASMSP1">Check out part one of our conversation here.</a>
(Part two is coming.)

ALC-Issue-022626(Featured)

We&rsquo;re living in an epic period of change, danger, and opportunity. The economy is blowing up in our faces. The Fed is printing trillions of dollars. People are getting fired and replaced by computers. Every day, we&rsquo;re bombarded with fake news and fake data. Crypto is eating everything online. Every &ldquo;fix&rdquo; from the government makes things worse. Technology is moving too fast for anyone to keep up.
In short, the Old World has been demolished&hellip; the new world is just beginning. Alongside the greatest wealth shift in human history. We get it. People are desperate for answers and to cut through the noise. Everyone wants to become financially secure. Nobody knows who to trust. That&rsquo;s where we can help.
Altucher Confidential&nbsp;is your guide to surviving and thriving in the age of risk, chaos, and tremendous rewards. This is not a newsletter for the faint of heart. It&rsquo;s a guide West, to the new frontier. For those who are ready to hear, James Altucher and Chris Campbell provide an updated map of the new territory for generating wealth and freedom. Consider&nbsp;Altucher Confidential&nbsp;your daily guide to building, keeping, and investing your money and breaking free from the chains of rusted, old thinking.

mobile masthead-ALTCONF

AltucherConfidential

Altucher Confidential is your guide to surviving and thriving in the age of risk, chaos, and tremendous rewards. This is not a newsletter for the faint of heart.

Altucher Confidential

Martin Shkreli: Confessions of the “Most Hated Man”

If you&rsquo;ve followed me a while, you know my story includes big wins, painful losses, deep depressions, big comebacks, and more reinventions than Madonna.
Between all of it, I spent a lot of years trying to understand how success and self-destruction can live so close together.
Recently, on the TruthWorks podcast with Jessica Neal and Patty McCord, we went straight into all of it.
My full story.
The real arc:
HBO &rarr; $50 million &rarr; $46 &rarr; depression &rarr; rebuilding &rarr; repeat.
And the most important things I learned through it all.
If you&rsquo;re new here&mdash;and even if you&rsquo;re not&mdash;this is me getting back to the basics. The things that saved my life over and over again.
But before I go further, I need to flag something time-sensitive.
My AI just flagged what it calls a &ldquo;blue spike&rdquo;&mdash;the same signal that&rsquo;s appeared before most major Wall Street buyouts over the past five years.
This time it&rsquo;s pointing to a tiny laser company tied to SpaceX. 
There&rsquo;s a closed-door space conference ending Thursday, February 26th. If Elon makes a move, it could hit fast.
That&rsquo;s why I urge you to check out my latest video.
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2510924">You can see the full breakdown here before anything goes public. </a>
<h3>My First Big Break</h3>
In the &lsquo;90s, I started my career in the least respected department at HBO: IT.
Back then, maybe five people in New York knew how to build a website. We all knew each other. We all started companies.
I started one called Reset.
I built HBO&rsquo;s website by day then built websites for American Express and movie studios and record labels by night.
After 18 months, I left HBO.
I kept building Reset until I finally sold it. Suddenly, for the first time, I had generational wealth.
And then I made the classic mistake: When you&rsquo;re good at one thing, you assume you&rsquo;re good at everything.
I thought making money meant I understood investing.
It doesn&rsquo;t.
Making money, keeping money, and growing money are three completely different skills.
I only had one.
<h3>My First Big Lesson</h3>
I didn&rsquo;t just lose money.
I lost:
<ul>
<li>My house</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>My family</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>My identity</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>My sense of who I was</li>
</ul>
And the worst part was the shame.
I lied to a friend when he saw my house listed in the New York Times. I couldn&rsquo;t admit I was collapsing. That&rsquo;s how strong shame can be.
Shame is heavier than bankruptcy.
And it comes back in cycles. 2009. 2015. You don&rsquo;t &ldquo;graduate&rdquo; from vulnerability.
You learn how to manage it.
<h3>The Four Bodies</h3>
One of the core ideas we discussed is something I&rsquo;ve written about for years. It&rsquo;s one of the big insights that helped me come back from rock bottom.
We all have four bodies:
<ol>
<li>Physical</li>
</ol>
<ol start="2">
<li>Emotional</li>
</ol>
<ol start="3">
<li>Creative</li>
</ol>
<ol start="4">
<li>Spiritual</li>
</ol>
Each one has circulation. Energy flows inside them and between them.
When something blocks, you don&rsquo;t just get tired.
You get a creative heart attack. An emotional heart attack. A spiritual heart attack.
You can&rsquo;t ignore one dimension and expect the others to thrive.
Founders especially think: &ldquo;If I just work harder, everything else will stabilize.&rdquo;
It doesn&rsquo;t work like that.
Sleep. Relationships. Creative practice (writing 10 ideas a day). Meaning.
They compound just like money.
<h3>The 1% Rule</h3>
At the end of each day, I still ask myself: What did I do today to improve my life by 1%?
Not a grand plan. Not a five-year vision.
Just 1%.
Physical.
Emotional.
Creative.
Spiritual.
1% compounds faster than ambition.
<h3>Failing Fast (Without Drama)</h3>
One of the biggest problems ambitious people face is holding onto dead ideas too long.
If a bird falls out of the nest and doesn&rsquo;t survive, the mother bird doesn&rsquo;t hold a ceremony.
She builds another nest.
Abundance mindset doesn&rsquo;t mean you&rsquo;re blindly optimistic. It&rsquo;s knowing you can generate another idea.
If you can create, you&rsquo;re never bankrupt.
If you haven&rsquo;t failed yet, borrow someone who has.
Get mentors who:
<ul>
<li>Have scars.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Have lost.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Stayed in the game.</li>
</ul>
The key to investing and entrepreneurship is simple:
Stay in the game long enough. You can&rsquo;t win if you&rsquo;re wiped out.
<h3>Why I&rsquo;m Careful About AI Investing</h3>
Speaking of investing, they asked me about investing in the AI age.
Here&rsquo;s what I said, broken down simply:
Large AI models are becoming commodities. Commodities become price wars. Price wars destroy margins.
The real leverage is:
<ul>
<li>Proprietary data</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Hard-to-access datasets</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Physical AI (humanoid robotics)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Hardware</li>
</ul>
The world is built for humans. The infrastructure assumes two legs, two arms.
Humanoid robotics is an engineering mountain. Mountains create durable companies.
The next wave of millionaires won&rsquo;t emerge from copying GPT. They&rsquo;ll emerge from owning what can&rsquo;t be replicated easily.
As always, my team and I are on the hunt for the BIGGEST opportunities throughout all of our letters.
And it&rsquo;s exactly why <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2511005">this potential SpaceX-linked laser acquisition</a> matters.
If I&rsquo;m right, it&rsquo;s about control of physical AI infrastructure&mdash;the optical backbone that connects satellites, autonomy, robotics, and global data flow.
Hardware moats are rare. When they get pulled into trillion-dollar ecosystems, repricing can happen fast.
If you want the specifics before anything becomes public, now&rsquo;s the window.
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2511005">Click here for my full breakdown</a>.

ALC-Issue-02-23-26(Featured)

Success, Shame, and the 1% Fix

Out of 1,500+ podcast episodes I&rsquo;ve done&mdash;hedge fund managers, billionaires, Navy SEALs, chess prodigies&mdash;I just did the only podcast dedicated to the mechanics of great sex.
Look, I get it.
There&rsquo;s a reflex to keep it unspoken.
To not talk about &ldquo;those things&rdquo; publicly.
Which is ironic, given how much of our imagination circles around it. We may not discuss it openly, but it quietly governs more of our joy and regret than most things we do.
That&rsquo;s why I had Dr. Nicole McNichol on the podcast to talk about her new book You Could Be Having Better Sex. 
And the truth is probably not what most think.
<h3>The Case For Great Sex </h3>
Nicole is a human sexuality professor at the University of Washington.
She teaches 4,000 students a year about sex. She&rsquo;s married. She&rsquo;s grounded. She&rsquo;s not running some secret red-light laboratory of techniques.
And she just published her new book, You Could Be Having Better Sex.
I went into the conversation with what I thought were reasonable assumptions.
For instance: for a guy, an orgasm is pretty much always good. So isn&rsquo;t that the measuring stick? One to ten&mdash;how strong was it? Nicole dismantled that.
Great sex, she said, boils down to two things: pleasure and presence.
You&rsquo;re not watching yourself from above, grading your performance like an Olympic judge. You&rsquo;re not comparing yourself to porn. You&rsquo;re not wondering if you&rsquo;re doing it &ldquo;right.&rdquo;
You&rsquo;re there.
And then she added something that most might not expect.
When researchers ask thousands of people what defines great sex, three themes consistently come up:
<ul>
<li>Pleasure</li>
<li>Caring</li>
<li>Connection</li>
</ul>
Not &ldquo;variety.&rdquo; Not &ldquo;intensity.&rdquo; Not &ldquo;advanced technique.&rdquo;
Caring.
Which is not what most guys grow up hearing as the main performance metric.
<h3>The Truth About Chemistry</h3>
We also talked about chemistry. I&rsquo;ve definitely used that word in my life.
&ldquo;We had chemistry.&rdquo; 
&ldquo;There was something there.&rdquo;
She drew a distinction that felt&hellip; uncomfortably accurate.
That anxious, obsessive feeling at the beginning? Checking your phone constantly? Not knowing where you stand? The push-pull, hot-cold dynamic?
That&rsquo;s not chemistry.
That&rsquo;s uncertainty.
Sometimes even old wounds playing out.
Chemistry, she said, is feeling wanted.
Chosen. Seen.
Here&rsquo;s the stat that surprised me the most: the number one sexual fantasy in America is feeling desired.
Which means all the &ldquo;don&rsquo;t text back too fast&rdquo; strategies and mysterious aloofness might be optimizing for the exact opposite of what people actually crave.
<h3>No Wonder Everyone&rsquo;s Anxious</h3>
We also talked about the &ldquo;culture of chill.&rdquo;
It&rsquo;s now common to be physically involved with someone and still technically &ldquo;just talking.&rdquo;
And then everyone wonders why they&rsquo;re anxious.
She suggested something radical.
Ask.
&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not sure what you&rsquo;re looking for. Can you tell me?&rdquo;
People are afraid to just ask.
Another important piece was how much non-sexual intimacy matters.
If the only time you touch your partner is when you want sex, touch starts to feel like a transaction.
A request. A negotiation.
But if you&rsquo;re hugging, sitting close, casually affectionate without expectation, that feeds desire instead of pressuring it.
It&rsquo;s less about performance and more about atmosphere.
So what separates bad sex from good sex?
Bad sex feels scripted. Performative. Transactional. Disconnected.
Good sex feels responsive. Mutual. Grounded. Wanted.
No dungeon required.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hB8K_9lpM8">Listen to the whole conversation on Youtube right here</a>.

ALC-Issue-02-18-26(Featured)

The Myth of Great Sex

I want to be clear about something before I say anything else.
I&rsquo;m not an AI pessimist.
I&rsquo;ve never been an AI pessimist.
I&rsquo;m usually the one saying, relax&mdash;every new technology scares people at first. Electricity, the printing press, the internet, nuclear power.
Same pattern every time. Real risks, huge upside, and in the end, the apocalyptic nightmare situations never happen.
So when I say something made me nervous this morning, I mean actually nervous. For the first time.
I talked about this last week, but it mattered enough that I devoted an entire podcast episode to it. I&rsquo;ll break it down here.
Here&rsquo;s what happened, to recap.
<h3>Altman&rsquo;s $250M Bet</h3>
OpenAI&mdash;the company behind ChatGPT, which roughly a billion people now use&mdash;just invested $250 million into a brain-computer interface company called Merge Labs.
That sentence alone should make you pause.
Not because brain-computer interfaces are new. Neuralink has been around. Elon Musk talks about it all the time.
What made me stop and think was this:
OpenAI just raised $20 billion.
Companies usually raise money because they need money.
They don&rsquo;t usually raise money and immediately deploy a quarter-billion dollars into another company&mdash;especially one operating at the boundary between biology, AI, and the human mind.
And there&rsquo;s another detail most articles I&rsquo;ve read skipped completely: Sam Altman is a co-founder of both OpenAI and Merge Labs.
Look, these are private companies. People can invest however they want. But when you zoom out, the picture gets&hellip; interesting.
<h3>The Last Interface: You.</h3>
Merge Labs isn&rsquo;t doing what Neuralink does.
Neuralink puts a chip in your brain. It reads electrical signals from neurons. AI learns the patterns. Thought becomes action.
Merge Labs takes a different approach.
They genetically modify neurons to respond to ultrasound.
Then an external ultrasound device&mdash;attached outside your skull&mdash;can both read and stimulate those neurons.
No chip. No implant.
Biology talking to AI directly.
At a high level, here&rsquo;s what that means.
Your thoughts can be translated into digital signals. Digital signals can be translated back into thoughts.
Reading and writing.
And once you have that, the use cases explode.
Medical use cases are obvious. Paralyzed people moving limbs.
But that&rsquo;s just the beginning.
<h3>Inside the Read&ndash;Write Mind</h3>
Imagine controlling devices with your mind. Thermostat. Phone. Computer. Car.
You can play games without a controller. Noland Arbaugh, Neuralink&rsquo;s first patient, already does this.
You can send emails without typing. You can communicate brain-to-brain. Literal telepathy&mdash;powered by infrastructure.
That&rsquo;s the mind-reading layer. The mind-writing layer is a little more crazy and not enough people are talking about it.
The same system that can observe thoughts, can also introduce sensory content, images, emotions, or impulses directly into neural circuits.
The bright side is it can restore lost sensory input. For example, it can help a blind person see by telling the neurons what&rsquo;s in the room. Or it can help deaf people hear music for the first time.
But the boundary between help and influence could get blurry.
Can companies implant thoughts in your mind? Not in the sci-fi sense&mdash;yet&mdash;but shaping which thoughts surface, repeat, or feel &ldquo;right&rdquo; already counts as influence.
Noland himself has said he believes this is coming.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5NzsM2sBGVBP0rBcYPFFrU/6153fd10f1b2d7fc73d49441e49906cc/ALC-Issue-01-22-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" />
And then, of course, there&rsquo;s the AI layer.
Instead of asking ChatGPT a question, you think it. Instead of reading the answer, it arrives as a thought.
Want to respond intelligently in a meeting? The response forms instantly. You want to persuade your boss? The phrasing appears in your mind.
Want to recall history, psychology, strategy, persuasion, negotiation? It&rsquo;s there, immediately.
<h3>It&rsquo;s Hard Not to Say Yes</h3>
And I&rsquo;ll be honest: if this worked, I&rsquo;d want it.
Not tomorrow. Maybe not next year. But eventually.
Because someone with this interface is going to think faster, learn faster, respond faster, and operate at a level that makes everyone else feel&hellip;
Slow.
That&rsquo;s the part people don&rsquo;t talk about enough.
The incentives are overwhelmingly strong for most people to want it.
Opt-out stops being a real option once opt-in creates massive advantage.
But here&rsquo;s another part that made me pause.
<h3>Data, Data, Data </h3>
Data is the fuel of AI.
Every large model&mdash;ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok&mdash;has access to roughly the same public data. Books. Tweets. Reddit. News. Videos.
What differentiates them is what data they get next.
And thoughts are the ultimate dataset.
Unfiltered. Pre-language. Pre-censorship. Pre-performance.
It&rsquo;s estimated humans think around 60,000 thoughts per day.
Multiply that by millions, eventually billions, of people.
Now imagine an AI learning from that stream continuously.
Every fear. Every desire. Every impulse. Every doubt. Every unspoken idea.
Even if only a fraction is captured, it&rsquo;s orders of magnitude beyond anything that&rsquo;s ever existed.
And once that data is absorbed into a model, you don&rsquo;t get it back.
Ever.
So yes&mdash;there are privacy questions. Big ones.
<h3>There&rsquo;s No Undo Button</h3>
Sure, there are safeguards that will be promised. Settings. Permissions. Controls.
But the technology has to read your thoughts to be useful. That line&mdash;where utility ends and intrusion begins&mdash;will be negotiated in real time, and under economic pressure.
I&rsquo;m not predicting dystopia. I&rsquo;m not saying thought police are around the corner.
I&rsquo;m saying this is the first time AI crossed from external tool into internal interface.
From something you use&hellip; to something that also uses you on the most intimate level possible.
And that deserves more attention than it&rsquo;s getting.
Because this isn&rsquo;t science fiction anymore.
This is capital being deployed.
I&rsquo;m still optimistic. I&rsquo;m still excited.
But for the first time, I&rsquo;m also nervous.
And that&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;m digging deeper into brain-computer interfaces&mdash;how they work, who controls them, and what happens when intelligence stops living outside us and starts living inside us.
Because once that shift happens, there&rsquo;s no undo button.
<a href="https://lnk.to/JASAI01">Click here for the full podcast, where I go deeper</a>.

ALC-Issue-01-22-26(Featured)

My First Real AI Nervous Moment

I&rsquo;ve known Scott Adams for about twelve or thirteen years.
He was one of the very first guests on my podcast. And of course, he&rsquo;s the creator of Dilbert, which was my favorite cartoon strip for decades.
Around 2013, he started writing about his life. His opinions. His approach to success. What actually worked for him.
The first book was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Then he followed it up with Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don&rsquo;t Matter.
Both are must-reads.
Win Bigly might be the best book ever written about real-world persuasion. Not theory. Not academic. Just how persuasion actually works when real people are involved.
Scott had a deep understanding of hypnosis. He understood the techniques at a level where he could use them naturally, conversationally, effectively.
How to Fail came directly from his life story. In that very first podcast we did together, he told the story of how Dilbert became a hundred-million-dollar success.
It wasn&rsquo;t a straight line. It was failure after failure after failure.
Over the years, Scott also became known for his political commentary. He had a daily podcast, Coffee with Scott Adams, which I listened to regularly.
Over more than a decade, he became a close friend. Even a mentor.
We talked on and off podcasts, both his and mine. And during times when I was frustrated or upset, he had an incredible ability to reframe problems so they would become wins.
When I first heard he was sick last June, I was devastated. He prepared everyone for what was coming, and a few days ago, he passed away. It was really upsetting.
I hate when people take advantage of someone&rsquo;s death by saying, &ldquo;Oh, I knew him great. He was my best&hellip;&rdquo; blah, blah, blah. 
That&rsquo;s not what this is. Set aside your opinions for a moment. Scott had opinions you may or may not have agreed with&hellip;
But ultimately he was a great artist. A great storyteller. He understood the DNA of success and the mechanics of persuasion at a practical, usable level.
You could genuinely improve your life by reading his books.
I love this guy. I&rsquo;m really sad he&rsquo;s gone. I learned a lot from him, and I want to share a little of that with you.
Rest in peace, Scott Adams.
And if you haven&rsquo;t learned from him yet&mdash;or even if you have&mdash;this is a good time to revisit what he taught. We always had a great time talking.
<a href="https://lnk.to/SAJASRE01">Here&rsquo;s a piece of that</a>.

ALC-Issue-01-20-26(Featured)

Scott Adams: Advice I Still Think About

Here&rsquo;s the dirty secret nobody likes to admit:
Open source built everything.
Linux.
The internet.
The web.
Google.
Apple&rsquo;s OS.
Microsoft&rsquo;s OS.
Every trillion-dollar software company is sitting on top of code written by people who mostly didn&rsquo;t get paid.
That&rsquo;s insane.
There was a Harvard study that estimated: Every $1 put into open source creates ~$2,000 in economic value.
Great ROI.
Except the person who contributed the $1 doesn&rsquo;t get the $2,000.
The value evaporates into society.
Open source solved innovation. It never solved compensation.
That missing piece is why so many open-source projects burn out, get captured, or get strip-mined by corporations.
But there&rsquo;s a solution&hellip;
<h3>Bittensor is the Antidote</h3>
Bittensor fixes that.
Not by closing anything. Not by gatekeeping. Not by centralizing.
By doing something more radical:
It turns incentives themselves into an open system.
Think about it this way:
Open source says: &ldquo;Anyone can contribute.&rdquo;
Bittensor says: &ldquo;Anyone can contribute&mdash;and the system will continuously decide who contributed best and pay them.&rdquo;
That&rsquo;s it.
That&rsquo;s the entire breakthrough.
Each &ldquo;subnet&rdquo;&mdash;which is like a business in the Bittensor ecosystem&mdash;is a competitive arena.
Miners bring intelligence. Validators judge it. The network rewards improvement.
No hiring committee. No VC permission. No r&eacute;sum&eacute; games. No billion-dollar GPU budgets required.
If you&rsquo;re a kid in Oklahoma with a better idea, you can compete with Anthropic.
That sentence should scare a lot of people. And it does. That&rsquo;s why they don&rsquo;t like talking about it.
<h3>What About the TAO Token? </h3>
People get distracted by the token.
TAO isn&rsquo;t a currency. Subnet tokens aren&rsquo;t equity.
They&rsquo;re instruments for incentive alignment.
Bitcoin stores the incentive to secure a ledger. Bittensor stores the incentive to improve anything.
Coding models. Drug discovery. Mental health. Compute. Energy optimization.
Whatever humans can define and measure.
Each subnet has a fixed supply.
No printing. No dilution. No &ldquo;just one more round.&rdquo;
Finite supply + infinite improvement = deflationary incentives.
That&rsquo;s why this works.
You can always print more shares. You can always reprice options. You can always dilute.
Bittensor doesn&rsquo;t let you do that.
If you screw up incentives, miners leave. If you get lazy, competitors appear. If you stop improving, the market moves on.
I don&rsquo;t know how big Bittensor will get exactly.
I do know this: Every major technological leap happens when incentives finally match reality.
Open source unlocked creation. Bitcoin unlocked monetary truth. Bittensor unlocks coordination at scale.
That&rsquo;s rare.
And rare things don&rsquo;t try to convince you.
They just keep working&hellip; until suddenly the world looks different.
And everyone asks: &ldquo;How did we miss this?&rdquo;
But you won&rsquo;t.
Not anymore.

ALC-Issue-01-19-26(Featured)

The Weirdest Crypto Bet I’ve Ever Made

OpenAI just invested $250M+ into Merge Labs.
This is fascinating on a number of levels. Not only because it increases the tension between Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
First, what is Merge Labs? And why would OpenAI, which itself needs to raise money constantly, investing a quarter of billion dollars in it?
<h3>A) Merge Labs is a "non-invasive" brain computer interface. </h3>
Let's define some things: "brain-computer interface" means software that somehow understands thoughts in order to interface with a computer to actually do things.
For instance, Neuralink, (which is invasive because it puts a chip in your brain), figures out which electric signals (thoughts) from the brain mean "move leg" and thus can help move an exoskeleton around the body so people who are paralyzed can move just with their thoughts.
"Non-invasive" means there's no chip in the brain.
So how do they do it?
<h3>B) HOW THEY DO IT: </h3>
Neurons already fire signals all day long. When they do, proteins inside those neurons change shape, position, or behavior. That&rsquo;s normal brain function.
Merge Labs is using gene therapy to make brain activity easier to detect with ultrasound, without drilling into the skull.
Then, they want to use mini ultrasound machines to &ldquo;listen&rdquo; for those protein-level changes from outside the head.
If that works, you get a brain interface with no implanted electrodes.
So, non-invasive. But feels weirdly invasive.
<h3>C) WHY INVEST?</h3>
1) Eventually people with BCIs (brain computer interfaces) will be "enhanced humans".
It's like having Google constantly in your brain (or ChatGPT!) So all 8 billion people will eventually have one.
And some AI will have to be the leader in being the AI inside each brain. That's trillions of dollars in revenues.
BUT ALSO
2) Data. Think of the data you will be able to create new AI on. Not only will you have everyone's tweets (current model) but you will be able to learn on everyone's thoughts.
<h3>D) AI THAT IS BUILT ON EVERYONE'S THOUGHTS is exactly why OpenAI is investing.</h3>
Data is still king (or God).
SO THE QUESTION IS: IS THIS A UTOPIA (a perfect world) NEUTROPIA (an authoritarian world pushing Utopia on the people - think Bladerunner), or DYSTOPIA (total control, loss of individuality, enforced by technology - think 1984 or ...THX-1138 (credit to those who get reference).&nbsp;
On the optimistic side, this is incredible.
Imagine restoring speech to someone who&rsquo;s lost it. Giving mobility back to the paralyzed. Lowering the friction between human thought and creative output.
History is full of technologies that looked terrifying until they quietly made life better.
But the same interface that helps someone communicate could also nudge behavior. The same signal that lets you express intent could, in theory, be measured, modeled, or monetized.
I am an optimist.
I tend to think that all (or most) new technology has bad elements but greater positive elements (e.g. nuclear energy).
BUT
Optimism doesn&rsquo;t mean blindness. It means staying awake while progress accelerates.
And with news like this, which is happening on a daily basis as opposed to a decade basis, one always has to wonder about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

ALC-issue-01-16-26(Featured)

OpenAI’s $250M Bet on Your Brain

Mahsa Amini took off her hijab on September 13, 2022, in Tehran, and three days later she was dead. Iranian police arrested her, beat her, and she died in the hospital.
Now tens of millions of people are protesting in Iran, and the regime is about to fall - an evil dictatorship that funded terrorism all over the world, was developing nuclear weapons to destroy the west, and, of course, hated women.
And nobody is really reporting this massive story. The Sunday New York Times home page? No mention of Iran&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/3BNfwVGwLkSsqBc1nX8VKD/02bd10e1f9778ed2da31e239212eb2f1/ALN-Alert-01-13-26_1_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" /> Source: The New York Times
This is the most despotic regime in the past 60 years. One that funded decades of terrorism and led to millions of lives lost and nobody is reporting the millions of people protesting&hellip;
And Iran has blacked out the Internet, cell phones, and all WiFi. No information can get in and out.
But do you know how I know this? How I know there are at least 13,000 civilians the government has shot and killed. How millions are in the streets. How entire cities are starting to fall?
Because of Starlink.
Through the use of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, Elon&rsquo;s space-based satellite communications company Starlink aims to bring high-speed internet to everyone on the planet. Anytime, anywhere.
Reports estimate 50,000 or more Starlink satellites are currently operating in Iran, despite the regime&rsquo;s communications blackout and banning of Starlink. And residents are beaming back images and reports to the rest of the world.
Indeed, Iranian officials are trying to &ldquo;jam&rdquo; the Starlink signal but Starlink terminals are still operating on the ground in the country, especially in less populated areas.
And it&rsquo;s not just in Iran. People on the ground in other war-torn areas like Ukraine and Myanmar have used Starlink to stay connected and get out important information to the world.
That makes Starlink, which is going to be the biggest IPO in history this year with a $1.5 trillion valuation - even more valuable.
<h3>Where Is the News?! </h3>
This is the largest feminist movement in history and yet no one is reporting on it&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/3KICGdfB0eP4RK44mYBw4S/319f4dcbc8a6caa1f6a0a522ac170b4c/ALN-Alert-01-13-26_3_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" /> (Iranian women before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Source: Instagram morbidkuriosity). <img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/Rz7uytuifVMrpbjsTAp2C/cd436475bf41f1a901b28f72ea5cebae/ALN-Alert-01-13-26_4_.png" alt="pub" width="304px" /> (Iranian women now. Source: Reddit).
Sparked by Amini&rsquo;s death in 2022, her life became a symbol of resistance against the oppressive regime. The phrase &ldquo;Women, Life, Freedom&rdquo; became a slogan of not just feminist opposition, but of wider resistance against Iran&rsquo;s brutal crackdowns on protestors.
During recent protests, we&rsquo;re seeing images of women burning or defacing images of Iran&rsquo;s Supreme Leader.
The so-called &ldquo;good guys&rdquo; in the legacy media &ndash; who &ldquo;report all the news that's fit to print&rdquo; &ndash; are silent. Where is the news? Can someone tell me? Why won&rsquo;t people report this?
This is a regime that has funded ISIS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, Syria, and every terrorist organization you can think of.
This is the regime that killed Mahsa Amini and countless others for simply expressing basic human rights. And the people are finally standing up&hellip;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/47cwYy4WEZ9BpILo6p8mqh/121ec7699fc2dfcd17d5ead6dbb48971/ALN-Alert-01-13-26_5_.png" alt="pub" width="540px" /> Source: X.com @IranObserver0
(Thanks to Starlink, we can see images like this - showing us what is really happening).
You don't have to agree with Elon politically to know his Starlink technology is changing the world.
It has the ability to shed light on the millions of protestors who are about to change history. It's helping them change history.
And without Starlink, we would never know.
<h3>We&rsquo;re Talking Space (in the App)!</h3>
Throughout our newsletters, we&rsquo;re going to give you a rundown on all things space and a lot more.
For example, in Altucher&rsquo;s Investment Network, you&rsquo;ll learn about every publicly traded space stock worth knowing about -- 17 stocks in total. We&rsquo;re talking the good, the bad, and the ones Warren Buffett inexplicably bought.
But that&rsquo;s not all.
Crypto is going to be affected, and I&rsquo;ll also have more to say here later this week&hellip;
Obviously oil is going to be affected.
The fact space is now available for humans to use and create means the world is going to change. It's going to change every single day.
Investing in change is the way to create generational wealth.
That&rsquo;s why we&rsquo;re paying attention to what is happening on the world stage.
But here&rsquo;s the thing&hellip;
The number one piece of feedback we get from readers and subscribers is that it&rsquo;s hard to keep track of all the information we send out.
Well, this just got much easier with our new (and 100% free) app.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/5cedPSKYeR55TkcGXbETZS/f363b8bfbebd31e9ad761b69a25fb455/ALC-Issue-01-13-26_1_.jpg" alt="pub" width="400px" />
The Paradigm app lets you browse all our content in one place.
The homepage is a feed of all the content you have access to. You can drill down to a specific publication (like Altucher Confidential or Altucher&rsquo;s Investment Network), to see all the recent articles from just that letter.
You can also get notifications for new trade alerts, which is very handy (and optional). Readers can also access exclusive content through the Daily Feed, where all the editors from across Paradigm post their quick thoughts throughout the day.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1tDsbqpzimnpmAWwSOLCt0/476655acabb7e134f48afd1c8247d082/ALC-Issue-01-13-26_2_.jpg" alt="pub" width="400px" />
The app also lets you bookmark key content for easy retrieval. I highly recommend checking it out (it&rsquo;s free).
Simply click the link below to download the app. It will automatically detect if you&rsquo;re using Android or iPhone and send you to the right place.
<a href="https://d2z65klgtz99km.cloudfront.net/PPG-App/">Download the Paradigm Press App Here</a>

ALN-Alert-01-13-26(Featured)

Iran Protests, Starlink, and the Future of Space

A few years ago, I recommended selling Bitcoin (BTC).
The decision felt obvious.
Ethereum (ETH) processed four times as many transactions.
Bitcoin&rsquo;s utility was unclear. Regulation was a constant headache.
While Bitcoin was the original cryptocurrency, better opportunities existed elsewhere.
But the world has changed.
As I explained in our Altucher&rsquo;s Investment Network strategy session last week, a military operation in Venezuela just made that crystal clear.
And now new catalysts for a Bitcoin takeoff are lining up&hellip;
<h3>A New Financial System Emerges</h3>
As Venezuela transitions, cryptocurrency could play a significant role.
Mar&iacute;a Corina Machado, Venezuela's opposition leader, is a Bitcoin advocate.
She said Bitcoin should be part of Venezuela's national reserves. She called it a "lifeline" that some Venezuelans used to protect their wealth and to finance their escape.
Under Chavez and Maduro, a year's salary in bolivars in 2014 became worth significantly less than a single U.S. penny today.
Bitcoin could become the new standard.
Unlike traditional currency, it works without banks, can't be devalued overnight by printing more, and moves across borders in seconds.
These features matter for Venezuelans who&rsquo;ve seen their savings evaporate under decades of dictatorship.
Venezuela's new government may encourage cryptocurrency usage to jumpstart the economy without relying too much on the dollar.
But there&rsquo;s another layer to the crypto situation in Venezuela that&rsquo;s causing me to change my view on Bitcoin&hellip;
<h3>The Hidden Bitcoin Connection</h3>
Donald Trump took office on a very pro-cryptocurrency platform.
He signed an executive order to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve and vowed to never sell the government's holdings.
Venezuela is an opportunity for him to fill that reserve without spending taxpayer dollars.
For years, Venezuela used Bitcoin to evade sanctions. When you're cut off from the global financial system, you find alternatives.
Experts believe Venezuela accumulated a massive Bitcoin stash. Some estimates put it at $60 billion.
With Venezuela under U.S. control, Bitcoin could soon belong to the US government.
<h3>Why I'm Backing Bitcoin Again</h3>
While Bitcoin doesn't have as many daily users as Ethereum, that could soon change.
In countries with broken banking systems, crypto provides an alternative. Because this is bigger than just Venezuela.
Iran and Cuba could also undergo political change soon, and citizens in both countries are turning to Bitcoin as their local currencies collapse.
Bitcoin, as the original cryptocurrency, carries a legitimacy that newer coins can't yet match.
The anticipation of mass adoption will drive up the price enormously in the coming months.
Investors who position themselves with the right investments, like Bitcoin, can create massive wealth from this transformation.

ALC-Issue-01-12-26(Featured)

Bitcoin After Venezuela

Once upon a time, people said Amazon was &ldquo;that weird online bookstore.&rdquo;
When the first iPhone came out, people said, &ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t even have buttons. This thing will never work.&rdquo;
They also said, &ldquo;Why do we need Google? We have Yahoo.&rdquo;
And YouTube was &ldquo;that site where people upload cat videos.&rdquo;
That&rsquo;s the moment we&rsquo;re in with Bittensor. It still looks niche. Still looks experimental. Still looks &ldquo;early.&rdquo;
But those are exactly the types of plays that create fortunes for the patient and convicted.
Recently, my co-host JJ and I filmed our holiday special of the TAO Pod.
You should listen to the whole thing. (Link below.)
But here are the highlights:
<h3>1. Bitcoin = digital capital. Bittensor = digital capitalism.</h3>
Bitcoin pays you to solve a math puzzle only useful to Bitcoin. Bittensor pays you to solve real problems: coding, inference, GPU hosting, drug discovery, weather prediction, 3D models.
It&rsquo;s 128 Satoshis running 128 micro-economies.
<h3>2. TAO has shown incredible strength during the recent drawdowns. </h3>
When Bitcoin dropped 30% recently, TAO barely flinched compared to other altcoins.
JJ called it &ldquo;one of the strongest conviction communities he&rsquo;s ever seen,&rdquo; and I agree.
Why? Because people aren&rsquo;t buying a currency&mdash;they&rsquo;re buying exposure to a startup stock market that doesn&rsquo;t exist anywhere else.
<h3>3. Subnets are early-stage startups open to everyone.</h3>
If you want exposure to Y Combinator-style moonshots, too bad. You&rsquo;re not Sequoia. You&rsquo;re not Benchmark. You&rsquo;re not an LP in a $20B fund.
But on Bittensor?
You can accumulate a subnet at a $5M market cap before it builds a billion-dollar business. A Ridges or Shoots token at a $5M market cap is the kind of thing VCs hoard for themselves.
Here? Anyone can buy it. And to buy it, you need Tao. That&rsquo;s the reflexive loop nobody&rsquo;s priced in yet.
<h3>4. Retail never got VC returns from IPOs.</h3>
JJ went deep on this.
He did the research&mdash;15 years of tech IPOs&mdash;zero have given retail anything close to VC-style returns.
Not Uber. Not Snowflake. Not Palantir.
VCs get rich. Retail gets the exit liquidity.
Bittensor flips that entire system. Price discovery starts at $0, openly, with no bankers and no lockups.
<h3>5. Mining Tao today rhymes with mining Bitcoin in 2012.</h3>
Here&rsquo;s something to think about:
Mining Bitcoin from 2012&ndash;2016 would have returned 10&times; more than buying Bitcoin.
Why? Hashrate was low. Competition was tiny. The incentives were huge.
Now? A good miner on a top subnet can make $1M+ a year doing work that directly solves real-world problems.
<ul>
<li>writing code</li>
<li>hosting models</li>
<li>optimizing agents</li>
<li>generating 3D assets</li>
<li>discovering drugs</li>
<li>predicting weather</li>
<li>running inference</li>
<li>training lightweight models</li>
</ul>
Not burning electricity for the sake of it. Building tech.
<h3>The Real Opportunity</h3>
Bittensor&rsquo;s whole ecosystem is a skill accelerator disguised as a crypto network.
Whatever you&rsquo;re obsessed with&mdash;AI, coding, trading, biology, gaming, design&mdash; there&rsquo;s a subnet for it.
Or you can launch one.
Bitcoin took a swing at money. Bittensor is taking a swing at capitalism.
Once the first breakout subnet goes mainstream&mdash;and it will&mdash;that&rsquo;s when the real repricing happens.
<a href="https://lnk.to/TAOEP1201">Click here to listen to the entire podcast</a>.

Hi, I'm James.

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