Everyone I know is nervous.
They just want to get it over with.
But don&rsquo;t just tune out now&mdash;this is the moment to stay sharp. Right now is the best time to pay attention.
I've been studying crypto since Bitcoin was $114. I worked on Wall Street for decades. I&rsquo;ve been studying politics for a LOT longer than that.
I've seen innovations, trends, and fads come and go. I've spotted unicorns, predicted bubbles, and watched fortunes made and lost.
(Sometimes my own.)
But what's happening right now makes those early days look like a warmup.
These three things - politics, crypto, and Wall Street - are creating an investment opportunity unlike anything we&rsquo;ve seen before.
It&rsquo;s simple:
Wall Street isn't just dipping its toes in crypto anymore - they're diving in headfirst. BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citibank: they're all rushing into a very specific corner of the crypto market.
In fact, the CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink - the guy who once called Bitcoin a tool for criminals - now says this trend will create "the next generation for markets."
Without going too deep into the weeds&hellip;
Wall Street wants to put literally everything onto the blockchain - stocks, bonds, real estate, fine art, Treasury bills, you name it.&nbsp;
We're talking about potentially $100 trillion worth of assets.
But here's what nobody's talking about:
Tomorrow's election could act as a massive accelerant for crypto.

ALC-Issue-11-05-24(1)

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

Election Eve: The $100T Bet

Chris&rsquo; note: Friday is launch day. SpaceX goes public, and we're running a countdown to match. Every morning between now and then, you&rsquo;re going to get a SuperIPO: Countdown dispatch&mdash;a new Paradigm expert each day, walking you through everything you need to know before ignition. Miss one and you're flying blind on the biggest IPO ever staged. Today, we hear from James. Read on. 
This Friday, Elon Musk plans to take SpaceX public.
It will be the biggest IPO in history. Not "one of."
The biggest.
Saudi Aramco held the record for years, and SpaceX could raise several times what Aramco did before lunch on the first morning.
The financial press has already drafted the headlines. Gushers of cash. Millionaires minted by noon. A defining chapter in the American story, brought to you by a man who names his children like passwords.
And on the morning of the 12th, millions of people will open their brokerage apps, find the SpaceX ticker, and hit buy.
That's the mistake we&rsquo;re going to make sure our readers don&rsquo;t make tomorrow at our SpaceX SuperIPO Summit.
It&rsquo;s happening LIVE tomorrow at 1PM EST.
If you haven&rsquo;t already signed up, click the link below to be enrolled automatically.
<a href="https://signups.paradigm-press.info/2526666" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CLICK HERE TO GRAB YOUR SEAT.</a>
<h3>Day one is somebody else's payday</h3>
Here's the thing about an IPO.
By the time you and I can buy a share, the people who were going to get rich already did. The early Silicon Valley money. The insiders. The venture funds that wrote checks when SpaceX was a few sheds and a prayer in the Texas scrub.
June 12 is their exit. The bell rings, the door opens, and they walk out through it&mdash;with your money.
Then there's the small matter of size. SpaceX will be worth more than a trillion dollars the instant it lists. You do not get a thirty-bagger out of a trillion-dollar company.
The explosive, generational, change-your-bloodline gains were handed out years ago, quietly, to people you'll never meet.
So buying SpaceX on IPO day is like sprinting to catch a train that left the station in 2015. You'll arrive sweaty and slightly poorer, and the train will be gone.
<h3>The shovels, not the gold</h3>
There's an old rule about gold rushes. It&rsquo;s cliche, but timeless. It applies to every single new boom. Don&rsquo;t overthink it. Lean into what works.
The miners mostly went broke. The man who sold them shovels died rich.
Personal computers? Microsoft and Intel did just fine. The small suppliers around them did far better.
The internet? Cisco was the Nvidia of its day, a monster&mdash;and a handful of unglamorous infrastructure plays you've never heard of ran circles around it.
Social media? Facebook was a perfectly good investment. A tiny ad-tech company most people couldn't name returned roughly twenty times more.
The pattern is boring, but consistent. Buy the giant, earn a decent return. Find the right supplier, retire early.
<h3>Pay attention to what's happening</h3>
Which brings me to the part nobody's talking about.
Everyone is watching the rocket. You should be watching what the rocket is for.
Because something strange has been going on. Ask yourself why a rocket company keeps buying artificial-intelligence companies. 
Musk has already folded his AI outfit, xAI, directly into SpaceX. And that's the least strange thing he's done in the last twelve months.
These are not the habits of a firm that simply launches satellites. Whatever Musk is actually building, most investors won't see it until it's spelled out in black and white.
The moment SpaceX goes public, it has to open its books.
Every supplier. Every partner. Every quiet little company sitting on a patent Musk can't execute his plan without. All of it disclosed, filed, and picked over by every analyst on Wall Street within the hour.
Right now, those companies are invisible. Cheap to buy. Ignored. After June 12, they won't be.
SpaceX has already dragged the cost of reaching orbit from around $15,600 a kilogram in 2008 to under a thousand today&mdash;a 93% collapse. When something gets that much cheaper that fast, a frontier opens up behind it. And frontiers are where fortunes get made by the people who arrive first.
<h3>So here's what to do before the IPO</h3>
Don't buy SpaceX on IPO day. Let the herd do that.
Stop staring at the ticker and start tracing the supply chain. Find the small, unglamorous companies Musk has already cut deals with&mdash;the ones holding technology he needs and can't replicate. Do it before the SEC filing does the work for you, because the window to be early slams shut the instant that bell rings.
Jim Rickards, Enrique Abeyta, and myself have already done that homework. We&rsquo;ve traced Musk's moves back to one tiny company&mdash;and we&rsquo;re laying the entire case out together tomorrow at 1PM.
Space is large. The opportunity opening up out there is larger. And for once, you can get there ahead of the crowd instead of buying their exit.
<a href="https://signups.paradigm-press.info/2526666" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Click here to sign up for our FREE SpaceX SuperIPO Summit.</a>
Best,
James Altucher

alc hero 060826

SpaceX IPO: Don’t Overthink It

I've played tens of thousands of chess games online.
I never cheated in any of them.
Except one.
I'll confess it now: I might be the first person in history to ever cheat at online chess.
In the 1990s, I helped build the first internet chess server. I also worked on Deep Blue&mdash;the IBM supercomputer that became the first to beat a world chess champion.
One night, I was losing to a guy I couldn't stand. So I connected Deep Blue to the server and let it crush him for me.
I never did it again.&nbsp;
Because here's the truth about cheating: there's no point. You win, and you feel nothing.
Here's why I'm telling you this&hellip;
I've commentated on elite tournaments on TV. I've had dinner with Magnus Carlsen twice&mdash;the man at the center of the biggest cheating scandal in chess history. I know the people who run online chess.
So when Ben Mezrich&mdash;the author behind the books that became The Social Network and 21&mdash;came on my podcast to talk about Checkmate, his book on the scandal, I figured I knew the whole story.
I was wrong.&nbsp;
Even if you don&rsquo;t care about chess, this story is important for investors to understand.&nbsp;
Here&rsquo;s why:&nbsp;
The only reason cheating in professional chess is even thinkable now is because the technology is getting scary good.
That's the real pattern everyone should be focused on.
AI keeps getting smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. And right now, it's about to turn up somewhere most people aren't looking: inside your smartphone.
On Monday, June 8, Apple will make what I believe is its biggest announcement since the iPhone itself. And one tiny $900 million company&mdash;the secret supplier behind their push into AI&mdash;holds the key to all of it.
I lay out the entire thesis right here: <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2526351">Click here for my latest (and biggest) 10X Apple prediction</a>.
<h3>The Real Story</h3>
The two people in this story could not be more different.
Magnus Carlsen is the Mozart of chess. World champion for a decade, the most dominant player who ever lived. People watched him the way they watched Tiger Woods in his prime.
Hans Niemann is the opposite. A 19-year-old American. Talented and climbing fast, but nowhere near Magnus.
In September 2022, they met at the Sinquefield Cup, one of the most prestigious tournaments in the world. Magnus was supposed to win without breaking a sweat.
Hans beat him.
And he did it with the black pieces &mdash; the side that moves second, the harder side to win from. Against the best player alive, it's not supposed to be possible.
The next day, Magnus did something he'd never done in his career. He withdrew. And he posted a cryptic video &mdash; a soccer coach saying, "If I speak, I am in big trouble."
Translation: I think he cheated. I just can't prove it.
A reigning world champion accusing an opponent of cheating, with no evidence &mdash; it had basically never happened. It was an earthquake.
<h3>Computers Always Win</h3>
Here's the part outsiders don't get.&nbsp;
A $20 app on your phone can now crush any human who has ever lived.
You don't need the whole game fed to you. One whispered move at the right moment, and you'd never lose again.
Online, cheating is everywhere &mdash; but the sites have algorithms that catch it. In person, across a real board, it's supposed to be impossible. You're watched. You're scanned for devices.
Which brings me to the anal beads.
Because no one could explain HOW Hans might have cheated in person, the internet invented an answer: a remote-controlled vibrating sex toy, buzzing him secret moves.
It became the joke heard around the world.
Ben tracked down where it actually came from: A ticket-taker on a train in Liverpool, England, whose hobby is trolling the internet at night.
He and his friends spammed a popular chess streamer's chat until the streamer said "anal beads" out loud on camera. They clipped it. They tweeted it.
And then Elon Musk retweeted it.
That tweet&mdash;not the chess&mdash;is why a billion people know this story.&nbsp;
<h3>Did Hans Cheat That Day?&nbsp;</h3>
After the game, Magnus wanted to walk straight to Hans's hotel room and just... ask him.&nbsp;
Did you cheat?&nbsp;
I love that.&nbsp;
It's so pure. It's also insane. Nobody admits it.
Chess.com, the biggest chess site on earth, ran its own investigation.&nbsp;
It concluded Hans had likely cheated online roughly a hundred times. But it found no evidence he cheated in that game against Magnus.
And yet.
When you're the best in the world, you can feel when something is off. That probably counts for something. But Magnus also walked in already hating Hans. Already primed to see a ghost.
The thing that both worries and excites me&hellip;&nbsp;
Twenty years ago, this story couldn't have happened. The technology didn't exist.
Today it fits in your ear. Tomorrow it's everywhere.
That's the part investors should be watching.
Especially before Apple&rsquo;s largest event of the year, on June 8. <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2526351">Click here to see exactly why.&nbsp;</a>

ALC-Issue-060426-Featured

The Troll, the Champ, and Elon Musk

Back in 2010, I went on national television and said Apple would become the first trillion-dollar company in history.
The hosts laughed.&nbsp;
Apple was worth about $300 billion at the time. Trillion-dollar companies didn't exist. The number sounded made up&mdash;like saying someone would run a one-minute mile.
I didn&rsquo;t back down.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1dPNEaacq9GZQkVXw36Oa9/f2b31e7679d044ba261e42dc0557c735/ALC-Issue-060426-1.png" alt="pub" width="500px" />
In fact, I later doubled down. I said it would hit $3 trillion someday too.
It seemed ridiculous. It was ridiculous.&nbsp;
And yet, Apple ran up nearly 2,900% over the decade that followed.&nbsp;
Anyone who heard me, bought, and did absolutely nothing else&mdash;no trading, no timing, no genius required&mdash;made almost 30 times their money.
I'm telling you this for one reason.&nbsp;
I just made my next big Apple call. And like the last ones, it's going to sound a little crazy.
<h3>Apple Will Win AI&nbsp;</h3>
Look at what the rest of Big Tech did.
Microsoft chained itself to OpenAI. Google shipped Gemini. Meta started spending like a small nation. Amazon dumped billions into the plumbing underneath all of it.
And Apple? Apple's big AI moment was a slightly less dumb Siri.
So everyone wrote them off. Behind. Asleep. Missed it.
I've watched people make this exact mistake about Apple for 25 years.
Here's what they keep forgetting. Apple has never cared about being first. They didn't invent the personal computer. They didn't invent the MP3 player. They didn't invent the phone.
They let everyone else burn billions building the market&mdash;then walked in with a better product and a better ecosystem and took the whole thing.
That's the playbook. And I think we're about to watch them run it one more time.
<h3>Apple&rsquo;s ChatGPT Moment</h3>
At this year's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)&mdash;happening June 8&ndash;12, 2026&mdash;Apple is expected to make its biggest AI push yet.
A real overhaul of Siri.&nbsp;
Apple Intelligence built into the operating system itself. Maybe even the groundwork for a whole new class of AI devices.
Right now, AI is something you open. A tab. An app. A thing you visit.
Apple is about to make it something you carry. Something already living inside the device a billion-plus people pull out of their pocket two hundred times a day.
That's how you do the one thing nobody else in Big Tech has pulled off.
You make YOUR AI unavoidable.
I think this is what takes Apple to $10 trillion.&nbsp;
Not Nvidia. Not Google. Not Meta or Tesla or Amazon.
Apple.
<h3>The Better Way to Play it&nbsp;</h3>
Most people will read this and either laugh or run out to buy Apple stock.
Fine. You'll probably do okay.
But I've been doing this long enough to know the bigger money usually sits one step back from the obvious name.
Behind almost every Apple breakthrough is a supplier nobody's heard of, quietly making the whole thing possible.
Corning made the screen. Skyworks made it connect. Micron fed its memory. Amkor packaged the chips. Coherent powered Face ID.
Unless you followed our research closely over the years, you didn't read about companies like these.&nbsp;
They weren't on the magazine covers. They weren&rsquo;t in the news (until it was too late). They looked boring from the outside.&nbsp;
But again and again, they're the ones that handed investors the bigger gains.
And I believe there's one of them at the center of Apple's AI move right now. A small company&mdash;around a billion dollars&mdash;that almost no one is watching.
The full case is in <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2526180">this short presentation</a>. Watch it now. Before it&rsquo;s too late. Because I can't promise it'll still be on the table by tomorrow.&nbsp;
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2526180">Click here to watch</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-060426-featured

Apple to $10 Trillion

Let me start with an unsexy truth.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s too boring for a headline, too obvious to argue with, and somehow still ignored.
The AI race will NOT be won by whoever has the smartest model.
I know that sounds wrong. Every headline is about models. GPT this. Grok that. Bigger, faster, smarter, every six weeks.
But models are not the bottleneck.
Chips are not the bottleneck either.
Energy is.
You can build the most powerful artificial intelligence the world has ever seen. Give it a name and a personality. And it will sit there doing absolutely nothing&mdash;because you can't plug it in.
That's where we are. Not five years from now. Right now.
Data centers already eat electricity like a small country. And AI adoption isn't slowing down. It's going vertical.&nbsp;
Every new model, every new user, every new agent doing someone's taxes or driving someone's car needs power. Enormous amounts of it.
The grid we have was not built for this. It was built for air conditioners and refrigerators and the occasional Christmas display. It was never built to run a digital civilization.
So here's the real question. The one almost nobody is asking out loud.
Where does the next generation of AI actually run?
<h3>It Sounds Crazy, But&hellip;&nbsp;</h3>
Elon Musk has been chewing on this for years. And his answer is not "build more data centers in Texas."
His answer is to leave the planet.
Move the compute into orbit.
Up there, the sun never sets. No night. No clouds. No winter. No grid to beg permission from. Solar energy in space is constant, brutal, and effectively free&mdash;the most efficient power environment human beings have ever had access to. And we are barely touching it.
If even part of AI compute moves up there, we're looking at a brand-new layer of infrastructure underneath the entire economy. The way railroads were a layer. The way the internet was a layer.
And Elon has actually put a number on it.
He believes this shift&mdash;space-based power feeding space-based AI&mdash;could unleash $1 quadrillion in new wealth.
Let me write that out so it lands properly.&nbsp;
<h3>$1,000,000,000,000,000.</h3>
That is not my number. I want to be very clear about that. That number comes from Elon himself.
At Tesla's last shareholder meeting, Elon said AI and robotics could grow the global economy "by a factor of 10 or maybe 100." Run the low end against world GDP and you land on $1 quadrillion.
And here's why he can say it with a straight face: This doesn't apply to one product. It applies to everything he is building.
The robotaxi network. The Optimus humanoid robots. Grok, and whatever comes after Grok. Every one of those runs on compute. And compute runs on power.
So the real bottleneck across his entire empire is power. Always power. Solve power, and you don't improve one product&mdash;you unlock all of them at once.
<h3>The Tiny Company On Elon&rsquo;s Radar&nbsp;</h3>
SpaceX is heading toward what could be the largest IPO in human history. Elon has already folded xAI into SpaceX.&nbsp;
He's taking an entire ecosystem public.
And if you've watched Elon operate for twenty years, you know exactly what he does next.
When something is critical to his plans, he does not politely wait for the market to hand it to him. He buys it. He partners with it. Or he pulls it inside the tent.
He did it before. He'll do it again.
Which is exactly why I've been digging into one small company that already lives inside this world.
It already works with SpaceX.
It already has real, functioning technology in orbit&mdash;today.
It&rsquo;s NOT a household name. You've never seen it on CNBC. Most professional investors couldn't tell you what it does.
But it is sitting on precisely the kind of technology a man building a trillion-dollar AI empire cannot afford to be without.
That hands it three ways to win: rising demand, deeper partnerships&mdash;and the one I keep circling back to, a buyout.
The company name, the ticker, and our full buyout analysis are not in this letter&mdash;and they're not going on a public page anywhere.&nbsp;
I put them inside a small beta-test I&rsquo;ve recently launched.
Beta testers who join today get an early look at this company, plus the next wave of opportunities my team is already digging into.
Everyone else reads about these specific opportunities later, after the easy money is gone.
The link below is the only way in:&nbsp;
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2524599">Get all the details on my beta-test here</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-051926-Featured

THE $1 QUADRILLION PATENT

David Epstein was sitting across from me again.
The last time we met was 2019, above a comedy club.&nbsp;
He had just written Range and showed why the late starters, the switchers, the people who can't sit still in one field, are the ones who eventually win big.&nbsp;
Now he just came back on my podcast to talk about his new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.
In this one, he proved something I'd suspected for years&hellip;&nbsp;
That freedom is overrated and limitations are underrated.
<h3>The Green Eggs and Ham Model</h3>
Dr. Seuss couldn't write Cat in the Hat until his publisher bet him he couldn't write a book using only 50 words.&nbsp;
That became Green Eggs and Ham.
Psychologists call this the Green Eggs and Ham model of creativity. The best way to make someone creative is to restrict their normal means of doing something.
But everything is creative. Solving problems. Building a business. Picking a school for your kid. Writing an email you've been avoiding for three weeks.
Every one of them is a blank page in disguise.
And every one of them gets easier the second you stop giving yourself room. My best writing has always come from constraints. The 600-word essay. The five-minute set. The deadline.
Unlimited time gives me garbage. Unlimited canvas gives me nothing.
<h3>Pixar&rsquo;s Secret to Success</h3>
David told me about General Magic.&nbsp;
In 1989 their CEO drew a thin glass rectangle in a notebook. No buttons. Touchscreen. Apps.&nbsp;
He called it the Pocket Crystal.
He saw the iPhone&mdash;18 years early.
General Magic had unlimited money. Unlimited talent. Total freedom. They went public in the first concept IPO in Silicon Valley history&mdash;no product, no revenue.
They built nothing useful. Every idea got chased. Total freedom led to total incoherence.
Had they picked one thing and built it, maybe the headlines would be talking about them instead of Apple.
Pixar was the opposite. I thought it was unfettered imagination. It was the opposite.
David told me it had rules:
<ul>
<li>The three-pitches rule&mdash;directors had to pitch three ideas because they always got attached to the first </li>
<li>Tiny teams stayed tiny for years before scaling </li>
<li>Every story followed the hero's journey</li>
</ul>
I asked him what constraints actually do to the brain. His answer: the brain is designed to do the easy thing.&nbsp;
Cognitive scientists call it the path of least resistance. Thinking is expensive. Give yourself a blank page and your brain reaches for the most repetitive option available.
Block the convenient solution. That's the whole trick.
<h3>What I'm Doing Now</h3>
When I asked David how to actually use this, he said: don't start with a blank page.&nbsp;
Start with one very specific question. "Why does tungsten use the symbol W?" beats "I want to write about chemistry" every time.
He calls it idea linking. The narrow puzzle pulls you somewhere the blank page never could.
Three things I'm taking away to solve any problem:&nbsp;
<ol>
<li>Cut your own time in half. Tell yourself the deadline is Friday, not next month. Watch what comes out. </li>
<li>Pick one specific question. "Why is revenue down in Tuesday's numbers?" beats "How do we grow?" every time. </li>
<li>Before you open ChatGPT, write down your guess. You'll be closer than you think.</li>
</ol>
David's new book is Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Read it.
The inspiration was never going to come from the blank page. The constraint was the inspiration the whole time.
Read the book. But before you do, <a href="https://lnk.to/JASDE01">listen to the podcast</a>.&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s one of my favorites of the year.

ALC-Issue-051426-Featured

Solve Anything in 50 Words (Or Less)

The embassy. The hostages. The proxies&mdash;Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the militias in Iraq.&nbsp;
A nuclear program that was always six months away from a bomb. For thirty years.
Through all of it, Iran held one card&mdash;the Strait of Hormuz.&nbsp;
Twenty percent of global oil.&nbsp;
Squeeze that, and the world economy has a seizure.&nbsp;
That was the standoff.
But&hellip;&nbsp;
<h3>It&rsquo;s OVER</h3>
I had Brandon Webb on the podcast this week.&nbsp;
Former SEAL. Runs SOFREP, a popular military news and intelligence site.
When Brandon tells me how the world actually works behind the curtain, I shut up and listen.
One thing he told me: the Mossad has a dentist on payroll.
A dentist.&nbsp;
Putting trackers in the fillings of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. The top guys.&nbsp;
The ones you can't reach with a satellite or a drone. You get them when they need a root canal.
That&rsquo;s the level we&rsquo;re operating at now.&nbsp;
Here's what else I learned.
<h3>Iran Has No Leadership</h3>
Not weak. Not fractured. None. Israel and the US wiped out the top of the regime.&nbsp;
Whoever pops his head up next gets whacked.&nbsp;
Imagine if we lost the president, the VP, and the top four people in our chain of command.&nbsp;
Now negotiate a peace deal with whatever's left.
Nobody knows who to call.&nbsp;
Including the Iranians.
<h3>They Played Their Only Card</h3>
They closed Hormuz. The world felt some pain. Gas prices wobbled. But the oil kept flowing.&nbsp;
Twenty years ago that card would have ended civilizations.&nbsp;
Today it caused a headache in Asia.&nbsp;
Solar, wind, domestic production, Venezuelan flow into the Gulf of America&mdash;the choke lost its grip.&nbsp;
Iran spent decades sharpening a knife that turned into a butter knife while they weren't looking.
<h3>The Venezuela Playbook</h3>
Snatch Maduro. Bring him to New York. Put him on trial.&nbsp;
Tell the number two, "You can keep your job. Just don&rsquo;t do anything crazy."&nbsp;
In and out. No US casualties. No nation-building.
That's the template for Iran now.
We're not installing a guy. We're not drawing new borders.&nbsp;
We're not spending a trillion dollars building schools in places that don't want our schools.&nbsp;
Surgical. Special ops. Air dominance. Drones. Get in. Do the thing. Leave.&nbsp;
This is how we should have fought Afghanistan in 2001. The generals who forgot the playbook are retired. The new guys remember.
<h3>How This Ends&nbsp;</h3>
Brandon laid out two scenarios.
One: somebody moderate climbs up through the mid-tier of the IRGC and negotiates a peace. Moderate by Iranian regime standards. Low bar.
Two: the economy collapses, the people rise up, and the crackdown doesn't work.&nbsp;
Why won't it work? Because the CIA and Mossad are inside Iran right now.&nbsp;
Ground Branch&mdash;ex-special ops guys whose job is to support internal opposition&mdash;is making plans for phase two. The opposition will be armed. Supported. Backed by air dominance.
The last uprising got crushed because Iran had a monopoly on violence.&nbsp;
That monopoly is gone.
<h3>Three Takeaways</h3>
First: Iran's regime is finished.&nbsp;
Maybe it limps along for another year. Maybe two.&nbsp;
But the version of Iran that scared the world for forty years&mdash;the proxies, the chants, the nuclear blackmail, the chokehold on Hormuz&mdash;that Iran is done.&nbsp;
What comes next is either a moderate at the table or a revolution in the streets. Both beat what everyone had before.&nbsp;
Second: the oil panic is overcooked.&nbsp;
Every time the Middle East shakes, everyone says civilization is going to collapse.&nbsp;
But the world has adapted. It&rsquo;s spent twenty years quietly building alternatives, and those alternatives are doing their job.&nbsp;
And third:&nbsp;
The next time you go to the dentist, pay attention. Somebody might be installing something.
If you want to be informed on the whole Iran situation at the next dinner party&hellip;&nbsp;
<a href="https://lnk.to/BWIJAS01">Listen to the whole thing (it&rsquo;s short) right here</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-051226-Featured

Iran Played Its Last Card

Kolin Jones was 19, broke, and stuck in his dorm during COVID when he decided to compete with billion-dollar private jet companies.
Six years later, his company Amalfi Jets will do $140 million in revenue this year.
A couple of things about Amalfi: It&rsquo;s one of the top 10 private jet brokers in the world and it doesn't own a single plane.
Kolin was just on my podcast to talk about how he did it.
It&rsquo;s a great lesson for anyone who wants to start a business but is thinking way too small.
Here's what you can actually steal from him.
<h2 class="subhead nbp">Out-work the math, not the man.</h2>
Kolin had no money, no connections, no client list.
So he Googled "Los Angeles attorneys"&mdash;because attorneys put their emails on their websites&mdash;and started cold emailing.
2,500 a day.
His logic: "If my competitor sends 400 emails a day, in one of my days I'm doing six of his days. In one month I'm three to four months ahead of him."
You can do this today. Pick a niche. Find the public emails.
Send 100 a day for a month.
That's 3,000 touches your competitor isn't making. Volume is a strategy people refuse to use because it's boring.
<h2 class="subhead nbp">Lose money on the first sale.</h2>
Kolin's first booking was a $25,000 charter to Cabo. The plane cost him $24,500. The client haggled. Kolin sold it for $20,000&mdash;a $4,000 loss.
Why? He wanted that client bragging on the golf course about how cheap Kolin was. The next sale was a referral. Then another. He floated the losses on his Amex, paid them off in 30 days, and built a referral engine.
The takeaway: your first 5 customers aren't profit centers. They're your sales team. Treat them that way.
<h2 class="subhead nbp">Be loud where the incumbents are quiet.</h2>
His competitors are 20 to 30 years old. They have private equity money, marble lobbies, glossy brochures. They post on LinkedIn twice a month.
Kolin posts 8 times a day across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn. His first viral video was about a client who chartered two jets at once&mdash;one for his wife, one for his mistress. A million views. 15,000 flight requests in a single day.
He doesn't try to outclass the incumbents. He tries to "bury them with irrelevance." When you think about private jets, he wants you thinking Amalfi.
Not VistaJet. Not Blink. Amalfi.
Apply this: whatever your industry is, find the format the incumbents refuse to touch. Be there. Be loud. Be daily.
<h2 class="subhead nbp">Track the variables nobody tracks.</h2>
Kolin built a social listening tool to study his own videos.
He performs 36% better wearing a black t-shirt. Filming at his desk converts 12-20% better than other backgrounds.
He doesn't guess. He measures.
You don't need a custom tool. You need a spreadsheet. (And maybe AI.)
What hook worked. What length. What time of day. What outfit. After 30 posts, patterns emerge. Most creators never look. That's your edge.
<h2 class="subhead nbp">Convert the attention before it leaks.</h2>
When his biggest video hit 50 million views, his sales team's phones were unusable for the entire day. So he hired seven receptionists to qualify and route calls before they hit sales.
Most people obsess over going viral. They ignore what happens after.
If your website, phone, and inbox can't handle a spike, virality is a tax, not a windfall.
Audit your own funnel today.
If 10,000 people showed up tomorrow, what breaks?
<h2 class="subhead nbp">The pattern.</h2>
Distribution beats incumbency. Personality beats polish. Volume beats budget. Measurement beats intuition.
The kid sending 2,500 emails a day from a Starbucks is going to eat the lunch of the firm with the marble lobby.
I've seen this pattern over and over for 30 years.
It never gets old.
It&rsquo;s worth listening to the whole thing.
<a href="https://lnk.to/KJJAS01" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Go listen to the episode here</a>.

alc-issue-04-30-26-img-1

The Dorm Room Jet Empire

You're about to give a speech. Your hands are shaking. Your throat is closing up.
Amy Morin's advice: smell the pizza.
Breathe in through your nose like you're smelling a slice. Hold it. Exhale through your mouth like you're cooling it off.
Sounds ridiculous. Works anyway.
Amy Morin taught me that&mdash;and a lot more&mdash;during my latest podcast.&nbsp;
Amy is a therapist. She also lives in a sailboat. She&rsquo;s also written more bestsellers than most people have read.&nbsp;
Now she&rsquo;s about to release her latest book, The Mental Strength Playbook, out April 28th.&nbsp;
We talked all about it&hellip;&nbsp;
And she just gave me some of her BEST tips for managing stress, anxiety, and the 3 AM panic spirals.&nbsp;
<h3>People Want Painkillers</h3>
Here's the thing about Amy's books up to now&mdash;they were all about what NOT to do. Don't dwell. Don't resent. Don't envy. Useful.&nbsp;
But people kept asking her: what do I do? What do I do RIGHT NOW? When my anxiety is screaming and my mortgage is due tomorrow and the market just crashed?
So she wrote the playbook. 50 techniques.&nbsp;
Painkillers, not vitamins&mdash;her words.
Vitamins are the slow stuff&mdash;eat better, sleep more, manage your stress. Painkillers are the things you can actually do right now, in the moment, when things get hard.&nbsp;
Both have their place.&nbsp;
But when your anxiety is screaming at 3 AM, you don't want a multivitamin. You want the fast-acting stuff.&nbsp;
That's what the playbook is.
Let&rsquo;s run through a few of my favorites.
<h3>Give Your Brain a Bedtime</h3>
I asked her about financial anxiety, because that's everywhere right now.&nbsp;
Her answer: Schedule time to worry.
Literally put it on your calendar. 7:00 to 7:15 PM. Worry hard. As hard as you can.&nbsp;
Then get up and do something else.
The research says your brain will actually obey this.&nbsp;
The thing that wakes you up at 3 AM stops feeling like an emergency by the time 7 PM rolls around because your subconscious has been quietly working on it the whole time.
<h3>The Stage Fright Trick</h3>
I told her about my old technique for stage fright&mdash;imagining the nervous version of myself stepping out of my body so I could talk to him like a friend.&nbsp;
She lit up. Said it's a form of psychological distance.
Narrative therapists do something similar. Your anxiety isn't you. It's a separate thing trying to talk you out of doing something.
That&rsquo;s when she taught me how to smell the pizza.&nbsp;
You can do it during a fight with your spouse and they won't even notice. It signals to your brain that you're not actually hanging off a cliff, so it stops acting like you are.
<h3>Why I Keep Losing at Chess</h3>
I told her about my chess problem. I know more about chess than I've ever known and I'm winning less.&nbsp;
We diagnosed it together on the podcast&mdash;it's a focus thing, an attention thing, possibly a cognitive load thing.&nbsp;
I'm running too many businesses, writing too many articles, juggling too many open loops. Something has to drop and apparently my chess focus is what dropped.
Her solution? Her life is simple for a reason. Sailboat. Books. One thing at a time.
<h3>Why Divorce Is Contagious</h3>
We talked about commitment. Long marriages.&nbsp;
Why being around committed couples makes you a better partner whether you have willpower or not.&nbsp;
Why being around divorcing friends makes divorce contagious.&nbsp;
You're the average of the five people you spend time with&mdash;even in your marriage. Keep that in mind.&nbsp;
<h3>Wait to Send the Angry Email</h3>
We talked about the long game.&nbsp;
Doing the stupid thing because being the team player matters more than being right. Not panicking when the market dips on your retirement account. Smelling pizza when every fiber of you wants to send the angry email.
Amy's gift is that she takes the soft mushy stuff&mdash;anxiety, commitment, mental strength&mdash;and turns it into actual moves you can run.&nbsp;
Plays. Like a quarterback flipping through a playbook on the sideline.
The book is out April 28th. Get it.
And <a href="https://lnk.to/JASAM01">check out the full podcast right here</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-042826-Featured

Pizza, Panic, and Painkillers

"If that's the future that you see, why would you ever want to live there?"
That's Peter Diamandis. On my show. This week.
Peter founded the XPRIZE. Co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil. Wrote Abundance. His new book&mdash;We Are As Gods&mdash;dropped this week.
I've had him on the show 10 times.&nbsp;
This one might be my favorite.&nbsp;
Not because I agree with everything he says, but because his vision of the future is so huge and bold.&nbsp;
<h3>The Next Big Pandemic&nbsp;</h3>
Peter thinks the next pandemic is coming.&nbsp;
But it&rsquo;s not viral. It&rsquo;s emotional.&nbsp;
A pandemic of fear. Fear about jobs. Fear about AI. Fear shaped by a decade of Hollywood dystopia.&nbsp;
Terminator. Black Mirror. Ex Machina.&nbsp;
&ldquo;If that's the only future you can picture, why would you want to live there?&rdquo;&nbsp;
So Peter's doing something about it. He launched the Future Vision XPRIZE with Rod Roddenberry, son of Gene Roddenbery&mdash;the guy who created Star Trek. $15 million to fund a hopeful, Star Trek-style film. Give people a more optimistic target to aim at.
I pushed Peter on the fear thing.&nbsp;
I don't think the job fears are ridiculous.&nbsp;
The nature of work is changing fast, and telling people "just partner with AI" is easy advice when you already know how. A guy doing labor in Ohio isn't going to wake up tomorrow and spin up Claude Code.&nbsp;
That's a real gap.
His response was three things.&nbsp;
<h3>Three Ways to Think About It&nbsp;</h3>
One: this is the Industrial Revolution all over again. People panicked that the machines would eat their jobs. Then they learned to run the machines. Same thing here&mdash;except you're going to manage AI instead of a loom.&nbsp;
Two: most people on Earth don't love their jobs. They work because they need insurance and groceries. AI is the thing that finally lets them do what they actually want to do.&nbsp;
Three: every human on the planet now has the tools to impact a billion lives. We're self-limiting. Those tools will get easier to use for everyone, conforming to the individual rather than the other way around.&nbsp;
I'm still wrestling with it.&nbsp;
I think the end-state is right. But the transition is where the pain lives. That&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;m worried about.&nbsp;
Then we talked about economics.
<h3>Extreme Abundance</h3>
Peter told me he talked to Elon on stage at his Abundance summit earlier this year. Elon thinks we're headed into triple-digit GDP growth. Not 3%. Not 6%. 100% year over year.&nbsp;
Companies shrink to 20% of their current headcount. Profits go vertical.&nbsp;
At the same time, 4 to 10 times more companies get started. Solopreneurs everywhere. Peter himself says he's starting more companies right now than at any point in his life.
But what happens to the people whose jobs vanish overnight and they don&rsquo;t start businesses? The government does one thing: It writes checks.&nbsp;
Like COVID, but bigger.&nbsp;
Think $3,000/month. Of course, inflation comes with it. But here's the other side&mdash;everything demonetizes.&nbsp;
Transportation. Healthcare. Education. Peter says the poorest person on Earth will soon have a chauffeur. The best doctor on Earth. The best tutor on Earth. All free. All AI.
I had questions here too.&nbsp;
Triple-digit GDP growth plus the government printing $3,000/month checks sounds like a monetary story that's never actually played out cleanly.&nbsp;
Peter's counter is that demonetization is the release valve&mdash;costs fall faster than checks get cashed.&nbsp;
Maybe. How smooth the transition will be is still up in the air.&nbsp;
<h3>Creators vs. Consumers</h3>
Peter splits humanity into five forks in the road for humans.&nbsp;
These are big choices coming to all of us in the next 10-20 years.
Do you double your lifespan, or keep the 79 years nature gave you? Do you go to space, or stay Earth-bound? Do you upload your consciousness into silicon, or stay biological? Do you merge with AI through a brain interface, or keep your skull sealed?
And then the one that makes the most sense to think about right now: creators vs. consumers.
Because every other fork happens on someone else's timeline&mdash;when the science arrives, when the rocket works. You're a passenger.&nbsp;
But creators vs. consumers? That one you choose today. With the tools already on your phone.&nbsp;
If you&rsquo;re reading this, you probably have Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini sitting right there. The split right now has nothing to do with access.&nbsp;
It's about whether you open the thing and build. And which side you land on probably decides which side of the other forks you get to choose.&nbsp;
Creators will have the capital and the agency to opt into the rest. Consumers get whatever trickles down.
Everyone reading this still has a choice about which side they end up on.
For now.
We talked for an hour. I barely scratched the surface in this article.&nbsp;
<a href="https://lnk.to/PDJASAI01">Listen to the full episode here</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-042326-featured

The Next Big Pandemic

"Nobody should feel sorry for me. I was really stupid."
That's what I told the New York Times back in 2016.&nbsp;
I meant it.
But there are things that happened to me I genuinely didn't see coming.
Things that broke me. Things that saved me.
And one thing happening right now that changes everything I've spent 13 years telling everyone.
1. I didn't expect to go from $15 million to $143 in a single summer.
I had a TriBeCa loft. Helicopters to Atlantic City. $100 tips to cab drivers. A $300,000 credit card just because I could.
And I still felt poor.
So I invested in everything. A device for deaf people. Internet stocks at the peak of the bubble. Zero of it worked.
The summer of 2000, I lost about a million dollars a week. Cash.
When it was over, I checked an ATM. $143. I stood there and cried.
2. I didn't expect to do it twice.
I clawed back to $10 million by 2007. Then 2008 happened. My fund collapsed. The columns got canceled. My marriage ended.
I moved back into the Chelsea Hotel. Same place I'd lived before the first fortune. The front desk guy looked at me and said: "You again."
No door on the bathroom. Old furniture. When my six-year-old daughter came to visit, I had to steer her around a used condom on the stairs.
3. I didn't expect to research ways to kill myself.
I'm not being dramatic. I had a $4 million life insurance policy. I calculated whether my daughters were better off with the payout than with me as their father.
Depression isn't sadness. It's not caring. About anything. About anyone. It's back to bed.
I tell you this because what happened next only makes sense if you understand where I was.
4. I didn't expect a ten-cent waiter's pad to save my life.
Walking on the Bowery one afternoon, I wandered into a restaurant supply store. Bought 100 waiter's pads for $10.
Next morning I wrote down ten ideas. Not good ideas. Any ideas.
Did it again the next day. And the next.
Move your body. Cut the people who drain you. Write ten ideas. Stop trying to control the outcome.
Four things. Sounds like nothing. It was everything.
5. I didn't expect a million people to need to hear it.
I wrote it all down. The ATM. The Chelsea Hotel. The web searches.
Put it in a blog, then a book I self-published on purpose&mdash;because the whole argument was that gatekeepers were obsolete, and I wasn't going to wait for one to approve it.
Choose Yourself sold over a million copies.
What I really didn&rsquo;t expect: a search for "I want to die" once returned my blog as the second result on Google, right below the Suicide Prevention Hotline. In one month, nearly 5,000 people found me that way.
People were on the floor too.
6. I didn't expect the world to get harder after I figured it out.
Choose Yourself was the right philosophy. I still believe every word.
But it assumed something I never said out loud: that everyone had something to choose with. Some runway. Some margin.
Some ability to take a swing without drowning.
7. I didn't expect groceries to cost $220 more a month than five years ago.
That's not a statistic. That's a family doing arithmetic in the grocery aisle and putting things back.
8. I didn't expect the savings rate to fall to three cents on the dollar.
Three cents.
That&rsquo;s how much the average family saves from their income.
How do you choose yourself&mdash;invest, risk, build, bet on your own future&mdash;on three cents?
It&rsquo;s getting harder for most people to see a way out.&nbsp;
9. I didn't expect Social Security to have a countdown clock.
Not a maybe. A scheduled event. Six years out. Automatic benefit cuts baked into the math.
Nobody in Washington doing anything about it.
10. I didn't expect to have to rethink everything.
The philosophy stands. Autonomy over dependency. Stop waiting for permission.
But before you can choose yourself&mdash;before any of it means anything&mdash;you need a floor.
Real income. Cash from the market that doesn't depend on a paycheck, a pension, or a politician.
That&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;m working on right now inside my network.
And I found someone who can show you how.
There&rsquo;s a man inside my private network.&nbsp;
He&rsquo;s a retired hedge fund manager. Completely private. In the first two months of 2026&mdash;war, oil crisis, extreme volatility&mdash;he turned $100,000 into over $205,000.
On Thursday, Jim Rickards and I introduced him to our readers at an exclusive, free live event called <a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2520614">The Insiders Suite.</a>
25 years I've been giving my readers investment ideas.
This is one of the most important introductions I've ever made.
If you missed it&mdash;I get it. Life happens. That's why I'm sending this one more time. But this is it, it&rsquo;s your last chance.
Before you can choose yourself&mdash;you need to steady the ship.&nbsp;
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2520614">Click here to meet him.&nbsp; </a>