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

Yesterday, I showed you the first-person shooter game I made with AI.&nbsp;
Ten and a half hours. 1.3 million tokens. Working physics. Crisp graphics. Every art asset generated out of thin air.
Total cost: sixty dollars.
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/4lCriiPHtprm30YnQzueHO/4dab54cde958c4181183d679aa6324df/ALC-Issue-072926-Featured.jpg" alt="James AI First person shooter" width="540px" />
I&rsquo;m bringing it up again today for two reasons.&nbsp;
One, because I want you to understand how remarkable this is.&nbsp;
Second, because it has everything to do with why I jumped on Mark Jeffrey&rsquo;s podcast Hash Rate this week.&nbsp;
First things first.&nbsp;
<h3>Why This is Crazier Than Anyone Realizes </h3>
A &ldquo;token&rdquo; is about three quarters of a word.&nbsp;
So the AI thought its way through a million words to hand me a video game. That&rsquo;s about the length of the complete Harry Potter series.&nbsp;
And it did it in about ten hours.&nbsp;
I couldn't read a million words in ten hours. Nobody could. Let alone program a game from scratch.&nbsp;
And how it did it is even more remarkable.&nbsp;
I lifted the method from Matt Schumer. You tell the model to screenshot the real Call of Duty, build its own version, screenshot that, compare the two, split the work across agents working in parallel, and keep going until they match.&nbsp;
I'm a coder by background. I remember trying to make games twenty years ago. It would&rsquo;ve been impossible to make anything like this by myself, let alone in 10 hours. Even two years ago this project was a team of programmers, six months, a million dollars. I would have signed the check.
Today it costs sixty bucks.&nbsp;
Everyone is arguing about inflation. Here's a number nobody has in a spreadsheet: one job, a million dollars down to sixty, in twenty-four months.
I got into all of this with Mark. And it went somewhere uncomfortable for many software stocks.
<h3>So What's Left?&nbsp;</h3>
If I can clone a billion-dollar franchise in a day for the price of a decent dinner, then the code protects nothing.&nbsp;
If the software doesn't protect a company anymore, something has to.&nbsp;
Three things survive.&nbsp;
Data. An AI is only as smart as what it's been shown. And there's information it will never see. A bank's fraud records. A hospital's scans. A police department's body cam footage. Nobody is emailing that to an AI lab. Whoever holds the most useful data holds something all the cheap intelligence in the world can't copy.&nbsp;
Distribution. Being where the customer already is. I can build a better product this afternoon and never reach a single person using the incumbent. Ask anyone who built a better search engine.
Trust. The one everybody underrates. I could write my own tax software. I use H&amp;R Block anyway. Mine would probably be better. But when the audit letter arrives, I want somebody else's name on the box. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
Here's what all three look like in one company.
There's an AI project called Score that teaches machines to tell a forest fire from a guy with a flashlight on a camera feed.&nbsp;
Boring. Enormously valuable.&nbsp;
It works the way I just described&mdash;train on the specialized footage a general-purpose model will never be shown. And it reaches customers through PricewaterhouseCoopers, so it arrives wearing a suit clients already trust.
Score isn't a startup in Palo Alto.
It's a subnet on a crypto network called Bittensor.
<h3>The Trade</h3>
Bitcoin talked strangers all over the world into plugging in computers and burning electricity, and paid them in Bitcoin for the trouble.&nbsp;
Though it&rsquo;s down from all-time highs, few people can argue it hasn&rsquo;t been a massive success.&nbsp;
Bittensor pointed the same trick at AI. Run the machines through subnets (which are small AI companies on Bittensor), do useful AI work, get paid in a token called TAO. Best work earns the most.&nbsp;
Meanwhile, Kimi K3 released its open weights on Monday. These stories are related.&nbsp;
Because the moat everyone assumed the frontier labs would enjoy for years evaporated in about three seconds. State-of-the-art intelligence is rapidly becoming a commodity.
Commodities have no brand loyalty and no network effects. The cheapest producer wins. Full stop.
So who's cheapest? Bittensor.&nbsp;
There's another subnet on Bittensor running frontier models on consumer graphics cards instead of million-dollar racks, on the cheapest power on Earth. Cheapest anywhere. Market cap of about twenty-five million dollars.
Meanwhile OpenRouter carries a valuation around ten billion. A Bittensor subnet called Chutes supplies a great deal of what routes through OpenRouter and books roughly a million in revenue.
Bittensor, the network all of these subnets run on, has been dead money around $200 for over a year, waiting on a breakout nobody has delivered yet.
Cheap frontier intelligence might be it.
And here's what makes it interesting at its current price.&nbsp;
Bittensor is 128 AI companies wearing one ticker. Vision. Translation. Bank fraud detection. Several selling raw AI horsepower cheaper than anyone on Earth.&nbsp;
Together they're valued at roughly two billion dollars, at a moment when a single AI company can carry a trillion.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s the opportunity.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-072926-1

The Best AI on Earth is Basically Free

We have been infested in the past few days with &ldquo;unique&rdquo; news.&nbsp;
I say &ldquo;unique&rdquo; because it's not about inflation, or wars, or recessions, or flash crashes, etc. The market has spent centuries bouncing back from those things and it will continue to do so.&nbsp;
But what's unique is that AI, in just a few years, has 2 billion paying customers and many trillion dollar companies.&nbsp;
Out of nowhere. Imagine that. 2 billion users. Trillion dollar companies. And the innovation that (hopefully) will come from that. And the news cadence is so fast that the whole AI story gets confusing from week to the next.&nbsp;
Here&rsquo;s what we&rsquo;ve seen just in the past week or so. These are just bullets because each requires big summaries and discussion.&nbsp;
<ul>
<li>The rise of Kimi 3. Unlike the Deepseek moment a year ago, this shows that light weight, open source AI models could be just as good as the trillion dollar companies.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
What does this mean for trillion dollar valuations on Anthropic, OpenAI, and even SpaceX?&nbsp;
What does this mean for all infrastructure plays if I don&rsquo;t need as many data centers or chips?&nbsp;
<ul>
<li>The Chinese ASML. A trillion dollar monopoly &hellip; no longer a monopoly?&nbsp;</li>
<li>The NVDA / Open AI circular deal? Is this what bubbles are made of?&nbsp;</li>
<li>The Chinese Micron. Does Micron deserve , then, its trillion dollar valuation?&nbsp;</li>
<li>The release of Claude Fable. All of intelligence just became a software issue. And Fable is the software. What does this mean for every single company, from Adobe, to H&amp;R Block, to Intuit, to Microsoft, when Claude can do you better.&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Some more on that last one:&nbsp;
On Saturday night I put in this prompt into Claude Opus 5, using Claude Code on ultracode mode.&nbsp;
I want you to build a first-person shooter at the level of the most recent Call of Duty games. It should be utterly perfect, visually beautiful, with every single thing done at AAA quality&mdash;from textures to physics to anything you could think of.
Fan out sub-agents and have sub-agents tackle each one individually so that the game is utterly perfect. You should /loop on each item and have a separate sub-agent check it visually to ensure it looks triple A. That separate sub-agent should be a really harsh critic, and if it doesn't look triple A, it should keep going.
Don't stop until each sub-agent is utterly wowed with the quality when compared with the actual Call of Duty game. It should literally compare them side by side blind and say which one looks better. Do this in ThreeJS. /loop until it's utterly perfect. Fan out sub-agents and ultracode.
I let it run for 10 hours.&nbsp;
The result was a complete first person shooter game at arguably the quality level of Call of Duty.&nbsp;
I stopped it at ten hours. If I had let it run for 20 hours it would be even better.&nbsp;
I posted a video about the game and the game itself to play at <a href="https://operation-blackout-trailer.vercel.app/">https://operation-blackout-trailer.vercel.app/</a>
The reason I did it was to:&nbsp;
<ol>
<li>Learn. Since I just gave you the prompt, you guys should try it also.&nbsp;</li>
<li>It shows me that software that once cost millions to develop can now be developed for less than $100. </li>
</ol>
In other words, software is disposable.&nbsp;
The entire way we value companies is going to change then.
Because all intelligence has also become a software question. For instance, instead of hiring an ad agency, NIke can just use a future version of Claude by saying, &ldquo;Make me the best super bowl commercial&rdquo;. And NIke will save millions and get a better result.&nbsp;
Will this happen? I&rsquo;ve spoken to Nike&rsquo;s head of marketing and I&rsquo;ve spoken to their ad agencies. The first is excited and the second is scared.&nbsp;
The world will be a better place.&nbsp;
But, first, there are going to be many valuation hiccups as we absorb all of this news plus who knows what news will be coming next week.&nbsp;
I will compare this to the Internet Bubble in the 90s. Not the bubble part but the fact that we are seeing the rise of a technology that is still at its inception that is going to drastically change the world in ways we can&rsquo;t even predict from week to week.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue072826-featured

THE WORLD JUST CHANGED. WHAT HAPPENED?

I&rsquo;m 58.&nbsp;
I haven&rsquo;t really been to a doctor since I was 18.&nbsp;
Recently, I hired a concierge doctor to run blood work. Everything was fine, but there was a small indication I might have pre-diabetes.&nbsp;
So he put me on something called tirzepatide.&nbsp;
It's a once-weekly shot that mimics two gut hormones&mdash;GLP-1 and GIP&mdash;the ones in charge of blood sugar and appetite.&nbsp;
Everyone's on it. Now I'm everyone.
Then one day I doubled the dose, felt awful, and thought: this must be the peptides kicking in. This is terrible!&nbsp;
I was wrong. I had COVID.
So, to figure out what to expect, I called Charles Duhigg.&nbsp;
He wrote The Power of Habit.&nbsp;
He's also lost 45 pounds on this stuff over two years. He explained what I'd actually signed up for.
Here's what I learned.
<h3 class="subhead nbp">Gila Monster Venom</h3>
Peptides are all the rage right now.&nbsp;
They're just short chains of amino acids, the same building blocks that make up proteins, only smaller.&nbsp;
Your body already runs on them; they act as signals telling cells what to do. Tirzepatide is one of these.&nbsp;
The longevity crowd uses "peptides" as a catch-all for a whole menagerie of these compounds, from the GLP-1 shots everyone's on to more exotic stuff people inject hoping to heal faster, sleep better, or outrun time.&nbsp;
And the weirdest part:&nbsp;
This whole class of GLP-1 drugs came from Gila monster venom.&nbsp;
The lizard can shut its metabolism down for months. A researcher wanted to know why. That discovery became the drug exenatide (Byetta), the first GLP-1 medication, approved in 2005.&nbsp;
Every GLP-1 drug since, including tirzepatide, builds on that lineage.&nbsp;
Now, here&rsquo;s what they do.&nbsp;
<h3 class="subhead nbp">Food Noise is Real&nbsp;</h3>
Charles described sitting at a table with a basket of fries. Not hungry. Full, even. And still his hand reaches over. He eats them, barely aware he's doing it.
That reach is a habit.&nbsp;
Every habit has three parts&mdash;a cue, a routine, a reward. The fries are the cue. They trigger a craving for salt and crunch. The craving pulls your hand.&nbsp;
You obey.
What the GLP-1 does is quiet the cue. You see the fries and nothing fires. The noise in your head goes silent.
And into that silence, Charles said, something extraordinary becomes possible. A window opens.&nbsp;
For a while&mdash;months&mdash;your habits go soft. Malleable. You can rewrite them.&nbsp;
And if you rewrite them well, the new habits stay even after you stop the drug. If you don't, the weight comes roaring back the moment you quit. Most people quit within two years.
The drug isn't the miracle. The window is.
<h3 class="subhead nbp">You Have Two Brains&nbsp;</h3>
Some habits drag other habits behind them. Charles calls these keystone habits.&nbsp;
Eat a little less and it's easier to run. Run and it's easier to eat the salad. Drink less and you sleep better. Sleep better and you focus at work. Focus at work and&mdash;
You see where this goes. One small change tugs a whole chain.
And the key part: Your brain isn't listening to what you say. It's watching what you do.
You have two brains.&nbsp;
The front one sets goals: I want to lose 20 pounds. I want to run a marathon. That's your stated preference.
The deeper one&mdash;the basal ganglia&mdash;ignores every word of it. It watches your behavior.&nbsp;
You didn't run this morning. You ordered the hamburger. So it concludes: this person doesn't actually want those things. And it quietly builds you into the person you keep acting like, not the one you keep announcing.
But flip it. Skip the fries a few times. Take the shot every week. The deep brain notices. Oh. He's someone who takes care of himself. And slowly the identity shifts to match the behavior.
I told Charles this sounded like the placebo effect. Like Todd Herman's alter ego stuff&mdash;Kobe becoming the Black Mamba before a game.&nbsp;
Charles said that's exactly it. You program the deep brain by acting like the person first.
The placebo doesn't change your biology. It changes who you think you are.
<h3 class="subhead nbp">Hear About My Journey</h3>
I'm now three weeks into my GLP-1 journey.&nbsp;
I'm keeping a journal. Because Charles warned me about the one thing that ruins all of this&mdash;you don't notice yourself changing unless you force yourself to watch.
If you want to learn more about these crazy drugs&mdash;and what Charles told me to expect&mdash;listen to the entire podcast. <a href="https://lnk.to/GLP1JAS01">Click here for the whole thing</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-issue-072026-Featured

The Gila Monster's Guide to GLP-1

I don't do in-person podcasts anymore.
I did this one.
I flew up to the city. My producer, Jay, drove up from Atlanta.&nbsp;
We did all of this to sit in a room with Frank Miller, because Frank Miller is the reason I think about stories the way I think about them. And I've never told him that.
So I told him.
In 1986 he wrote Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and the comic book industry split into two halves. Before it, and after it.&nbsp;
Every Batman movie you've ever seen has his fingerprints on it, whether the director admits it or not. He took a campy detective in a costume and turned him into a psychological condition.
<h3>Dead Parents</h3>
I asked Frank why so many heroes are orphans. Luke Skywalker, Daredevil, Spider-Man, Batman. He gave two answers, and they're different in kind.
The first is emotional, and he called it the real heart of it: there's nothing like a child alone against the elements.&nbsp;
A kid with no protection, no fallback, facing the world at full size. It's the most primal setup you can hand an audience because everyone has a version of it in their nervous system.
The second answer: Parents are a problem. Parents are kind of boring.
The only time Frank could think of it working was Spider-Man's Aunt May&mdash;and it worked because she was so frail she'd never look up and see him on the ceiling. A parent-shaped object that couldn't parent.
Here's another thing that got me. He corrected me on air.
<h3>The Myth of Obsession</h3>
I said Batman was obsessed. Frank said no. "He's possessed."
Sit with that. Obsessed is a guy who can't let go of a thing. Possessed is a guy filled with a force bigger than himself. That's the whole game. That's the difference between someone with a hobby and someone with a life.
I asked him how you turn a character into a myth. Not a character people like. A myth. Something that outlives the generation it was born in, like Sherlock Holmes or Zorro or Luke Skywalker.
His answer was almost insultingly simple.
You find one word.
Superman is hope. Batman is vengeance. Or justice. The great characters can be summed up in a single central theme, and then every other piece of them springs from that one seed. Superman wafts down from the clouds in sunlight. Batman gorges up from the bowels of the earth. Same universe. Opposite gravity. All from one word.
I've been writing for twenty years and nobody ever put it that cleanly.
Then he gave me the line I'm going to steal for the rest of my life.
<h3>Egoism vs. Egotism</h3>
We were talking about mentors.&nbsp;
His mentor, Neil Adams, used to trash his drawings.&nbsp;
Part of the training was making it a test of character&mdash;if you weren't tough enough to come back, you'd never survive the industry anyway. And Frank kept coming back.
I asked how you survive that.
"It takes egoism but not egotism."
Egoism to keep showing up after someone tells you your work is garbage. Not enough egotism to quit the second they do.&nbsp;
I've watched a thousand talented people die on exactly that hill. They had the ego to make the thing and none of the ego to survive the criticism of it.
He also told me to steal.
<h3>Nobody is Special&nbsp;</h3>
He walked it back a little&mdash;said he was being dramatic&mdash;but he meant it.&nbsp;
Nobody gets touched by heaven and handed powers no one's had before.&nbsp;
Drawing and writing are crafts you learn piece by piece, like building with Legos.&nbsp;
You learn from the people who came before.&nbsp;
Kirby ripped the panel across two pages. Neil Adams shattered the border. Frank followed them, then went further.&nbsp;
He called it a "tradition of revolution," and I haven't stopped thinking about the phrase.
But the advice that I think about most was his answer for a 20-year-old starting today.
<h3>Don&rsquo;t Chase the X-Men</h3>
Don't run at the number one title.&nbsp;
"Find something you think is a loser, figure out why it's a loser, then do it right&mdash;and you've got a new creation."
It works great for comic books, but it&rsquo;s also an entire life philosophy. It&rsquo;s a business strategy. It&rsquo;s the only strategy I've ever seen actually work.&nbsp;
Frank found Daredevil, a nothing character in a yellow suit, and poured samurai movies and Greek tragedy and crime noir into him until he became something people build shrines to.
Everything great lives at the intersection of the specific things you personally love.
I asked what skill mattered most, past the drawing and the writing.
"Determination." No plan B.&nbsp;
Failure was never an option because there was no version of his life where he wasn't telling these stories.
His new book is Push the Wall. Read it.
Frank&mdash;thank you. You have no idea.
And yes, he signed my Dark Knight Returns.
Watch the whole in-person interview. Even if you hate Batman. It&rsquo;s an entire career&rsquo;s worth of wisdom from a legend packed into 43 minutes.&nbsp;
<a href="https://lnk.to/JASFM01">Click here to watch (or listen)</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-071526-Featured

Why Your Hero Needs Dead Parents

Here's something I don't tell many people.
My father had glaucoma. So did my uncle. My grandmother. My great-grandmother. Probably her mother too, back far enough that nobody bothered writing it down.
Glaucoma is what happens when the eye ages badly. It takes your vision slowly and it never gives it back. Once you lose it, it's gone. Forever. That's the one thing everybody in medicine agrees on.
Last time I got tested, they had to run it twice. It was close. I'm now older than every relative of mine was when they first got it. Maybe I dodged it. Maybe I'm just running late.
So when David Sinclair came on my podcast and said he's about to reverse aging in a human eye, I'm not listening as a podcast host.&nbsp;
I'm listening as a guy who expects to go blind.
We first talked back in 2019, when his book Lifespan came out. That book changed how I live. I started taking supplements. I got serious about intermittent fasting. I started guarding my sleep like it was money.&nbsp;
And every time David came on the show after that, I asked the same question&mdash;when does aging actually reverse? When does this stop being a mouse thing and become a me thing?
This time he had an answer.
But before I go there, a quick investor&rsquo;s note:
<h3>The bigger idea</h3>
Glaucoma is a symptom. David says the real disease is the aging underneath it, and the same goes for Alzheimer's, ALS, heart disease.&nbsp;
A young body fights those off. An old one can't. So make the tissue young again and let the body cure itself.
And when you do, it&rsquo;s a miracle.&nbsp;
David said they took old mice with dementia and rewound their brains, and the mice started remembering things from their youth.&nbsp;
The memories were never erased. They were just locked in a room the old brain couldn't open.
<h3>When can I get it</h3>
Three to four years for the eye, if the FDA fast-tracks it. Liver is close. Then lungs, kidneys, joints. The dream is a pill you swallow instead of an injection.
And his lab has already moved past Yamanaka factors&mdash;an AI-designed molecule that does the same rewind, cheaper and safer, with a first human maybe in 2026.
<h3>Why this one hit me</h3>
I'm going to get glaucoma. Statistically I have no business dodging it.&nbsp;
My only real hope is that David fixes the thing that fixes it before it comes for me.
He told me to come see the lab in Boston. I'm going. And I'll have him back the day the trial reads out.
In the meantime, <a href="https://lnk.to/JASDS01">go listen to the full podcast</a>. We even talk about all of the supplements I&rsquo;m taking.

ALC-Issue-071026-featured

If This Doesn't Work, I'm Screwed

I just sat down with Mark Pincus.&nbsp;
He founded Zynga, the social gaming giant behind FarmVille and Words With Friends.&nbsp;
He built Tribe, one of the first social networks, before there was a Facebook. He also put up the money for Raya, the invite-only dating app for people who'd rather not be found.&nbsp;
He's been a quiet hand behind half the social internet you've ever touched.
He also wrote a book. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's good. I told him so.
He then told all of my followers not to buy it. He said it's already out of date.
That's the kind of guy he is.&nbsp;
And that's why I wanted to talk to him.&nbsp;
So here are seven life lessons from the billionaire who sucks at everything&mdash;on purpose. (Which is exactly why he wins.)
<h3>A.] Build a failure machine.</h3>
In the early days, Mark and his team would send their subscribers dead links.&nbsp;
"Click here for 1,000 chips."&nbsp;
The link just went to a 404 page. No product behind it. They didn't build anything until 25% of players clicked.&nbsp;
The result? They tested more ideas in a week than the industry tested in a year.&nbsp;
That was the mantra. The product came last. The vein came first.
<h3>B.] Everything new fails.</h3>
Last year 40,000 apps launched in the App Store.&nbsp;
Zero hit the top 10.&nbsp;
Maybe one or two scraped the top 25 and couldn't hold it. Statistically, everything new gets crushed.&nbsp;
So Mark built a framework: Proven. Better. New.&nbsp;
Find a big boring proven business. Make one thing 10-out-of-10 obviously better.&nbsp;
Then add the smallest new twist&mdash;because that twist is the part most likely to kill you if you start there first.&nbsp;
<h3>C.] Copy like a master.</h3>
Words With Friends was just Scrabble with a twist. It got 14 million daily players. Scrabble got 2 million.&nbsp;
Slack was HipChat with better polish and a little fun bolted on.&nbsp;
Zynga Poker copied the leading poker games pixel for pixel&mdash;except there was no download, and 80% of users quit at the download button.&nbsp;
The real magic trick, Mark says, is copying something so well that nobody even accuses you of copying.&nbsp;
Kill your ego. Define success by whether a nurse in Indiana vibes with your thing and can't say why.
<h3>D.] Consumer is dead. For now.</h3>
This one stung.&nbsp;
Mark's old rule was the 90/10: if a platform could get an app to 10 million daily users in 90 days, it was investable.&nbsp;
No platform does that today.&nbsp;
Nobody downloads new apps. You don't. I don't.&nbsp;
We're not in discovery mode anymore. So the smart money has gone to enterprise and prosumer&mdash;a smaller base willing to actually pay.&nbsp;
Even despite everyone being able to build new apps with AI, that's where the puck is for the next two years.
<h3>E.] AI is an A student at proven and an F at new.</h3>
Good news for us humans. AI can benchmark and copy at the level of the best product manager Marks&rsquo; ever had.&nbsp;
It cannot invent the twist. So we're not getting replaced this week.
<h3>F.] Ship your weak ideas off to die.</h3>
Zynga sent failing games to its India studio.&nbsp;
The place became a hotbed of innovation&mdash;because nobody in India cared, so the team could just try things.&nbsp;
That's where they discovered subscriptions worked. Freedom lives where the stakes are low.
<h3>G.] Your cautionary tale will teach you everything. (So do the dumb thing anyway.)</h3>
Tribe grew faster than LinkedIn. It had no retention.&nbsp;
Mark got the trust layer wrong and stuck heroically with the wrong idea because his ego was glued to it.&nbsp;
Every theory in his book was forged in that long, painful failure.
Even though he says you shouldn&rsquo;t read his book, he&rsquo;s wrong. You should.&nbsp;
He's the godfather of social media and he represents, in his words, &ldquo;the dumb f*cks.&rdquo;&nbsp;
It sounds like an insult. It's actually his superpower.
Go listen. It's one of my favorites.
<a href="https://lnk.to/JASMP01">Click here for the full conversation</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-063026-Featured

The FarmVille Billionaire

This morning I spent $900 betting aliens don't exist.
The bet is dumber and smarter than it sounds.&nbsp;
The dumb part is the aliens. The smart part is the &ldquo;glitch&rdquo; underneath them&mdash;a flaw in how these markets price the obvious.&nbsp;
My wager: the United States government will NOT officially confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life before January 1, 2027.&nbsp;
Whether we're alone in the universe, I have no idea.&nbsp;
That's a different question, and not one I'd put money on.
The alien bet, though? That one I'll take all day.
Here's why.
<h3>The casino that lets you count cards</h3>
I&rsquo;m using a prediction market called Kalshi.&nbsp;
On Kalshi you can put real money on real outcomes&mdash;elections, Oscar winners, soccer matches, the weather in Chicago this afternoon.
You can bet on the strange stuff too.&nbsp;
How many times Donald Trump says a particular word in a speech. How many people pass through TSA checkpoints this week. How many rockets SpaceX launches this month.
Every bet works the same way.&nbsp;
A "yes" share trades somewhere between 1 cent and 99 cents. If you're right, that share pays a full dollar. If you're wrong, it pays zero.
Say there's a market: "Will JD Vance run for president in 2028?"&nbsp;
A yes share costs 60 cents. I buy 100 shares for $60. Vance announces his run, my shares turn into $100, and I've cleared $40 on a $60 bet.&nbsp;
A two-thirds return.
Simple. The mechanics take five minutes to learn. The money lives somewhere harder to reach&mdash;in finding bets where you hold an edge the crowd doesn't.
I look for two kinds.
<h3>Edge #1: People are bad at pricing sure things</h3>
This is the one almost nobody talks about, and it's sitting in plain sight.
When an outcome is almost certain, the crowd loses interest. The bet feels boring. The upside looks like loose change. Why tie up your money for six months to make a few pennies?
So the price gets lazy. A market that should trade at 99 cents sits at 90. Free money, left on the table because the gain feels too small to bother bending down for.
Back to my aliens.
"Will the U.S. confirm aliens exist before 2027?"&nbsp;
I can buy "no" for 90 cents. For me to lose, an actual government official has to stand at a podium and announce that extraterrestrials are real&mdash;and do it in the next six months.
I don&rsquo;t care what anyone says, this will not happen before the midterms.&nbsp;
I bought 1,000 shares of "no" for $900. On January 1 the market closes, the aliens stay unconfirmed, and I collect $1,000.
That's 11% in six months. Call it 22% annualized on something about as close to certain as this world offers.&nbsp;
Your savings account pays you 1%. The stock market doesn't average 20% in a good year.
Now, the discipline.&nbsp;
I would never park all my money on a single sure thing&mdash;because every so often the impossible files its paperwork and shows up.&nbsp;
The trick is a basket. Thirty different near-certainties, each bought around 90 cents, each paying a dollar.
Lose one and the other twenty-nine cover it with room to spare.
Here's another one I bought this week.
"How many rockets will SpaceX launch in June?"&nbsp;
Five days left in the month. SpaceX has already launched 13. The "above 13" share trades at 94 cents.
They have a launch on the calendar two days from now. That makes 14. Their last failed launch was in June of 2024. So I'm paying 94 cents for something I expect to be worth a dollar by Friday.
Five percent. In five days.
There are about seventy of those five-day windows in a year. Clip 5% on most of them and the compounding does something violent to your account balance.&nbsp;
This is the dull little engine that quietly outruns every hot stock tip you've ever chased down an alley.
<h3>Edge #2: Do the homework nobody else will do</h3>
The second edge shows up when you bring your own data to a market priced on feelings.
My favorite hunting ground is Donald Trump.
On July 24 there's the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and Kalshi runs a market on which words Trump will use.&nbsp;
You can pay 87 cents that he says "fake news"&mdash;fair enough, the man will be standing in a room full of reporters he can't stand.&nbsp;
There's an 85% line on "oil," an 82% line on "ballroom," a 75% line on "250" for the country's anniversary.
And then there's "movie star," priced at roughly a coin flip.
So I did what the emotional money never bothers to do. I pulled Trump's last three months of speeches and counted every word.
"Oil," 17 times. "Iran," 15. "China," 13. "Hoax," four. "Barack Hussein Obama," three. "Movie star"?
Zero.
I went further back. The last time I can find him saying "movie star" was a 2016 campaign stop, where he pointed at a kid in the crowd and told him he looked like one.&nbsp;
In a speech, I cannot find a single instance. Ever.&nbsp;
He reaches for synonyms&mdash;"straight out of central casting," "like a male model"&mdash;but the phrase itself, in a hostile room full of journalists he despises? Forget it.
The market said 50-50. I bought "no" at 57 cents. I peg the real number near zero.
When the price and the truth disagree that loudly, you back up the truck.
Here's another secret about any market with Trump's name on it.
People bet their politics. The folks who hate him are sure he'll growl "Barack Hussein Obama" and "autopen."&nbsp;
The folks who love him are sure he'll hit "tariffs" and "oil." Both camps are wagering on their own biases instead of the tape.
<h3>Knowing when to walk away</h3>
Edge cuts both ways. You also have to recognize when you don't have one.
Every week there's a market on TSA check-ins. The "above 2.75 million" share trades at 96 cents this week. Looks like another freebie.
But everybody is staring at the same numbers I am. Last year's equivalent week ran 2.875 million a day. This year, ever since the Iran war, travel has been drifting lower. The signal is muddy and the crowd here is already sharp.
So I pass. There's no rule that says you have to play every hand.
<h3>The three bets on my desk right now</h3>
Aliens: "No," not confirmed before 2027. Bought at 90 cents. I think it's a dollar.
SpaceX: "Above 13" launches in June. Bought at 94 cents. I think it's a dollar, and I'll know by the weekend.
Trump: "No," he will not say "movie star" at the Correspondents' Dinner. Bought at 57 cents. I think it's a dollar.
Every one of these is a small, dull, repeatable edge. No fireworks. No hero trade.&nbsp;
And a portfolio of small dull edges, compounded with patience, will quietly embarrass the gunslingers every single year.
The unfair advantage is twofold:
<ol>
<li>knowing how these markets misprice the obvious and</li>
<li>doing the arithmetic everyone else is too lazy to do.</li>
</ol>
I still don't know if aliens exist. I just know they're worth money if they keep their mouths shut.

ALC-issue-062926-Featured

The Prediction Market Money Glitch

I don&rsquo;t usually know, five minutes into a podcast, I&rsquo;m hearing something I&rsquo;ll be thinking about for weeks.&nbsp;
This time I did.
My latest guest was Gareth Gore, a British financial journalist who wrote a book called Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church.
Before The Da Vinci Code, I&rsquo;d never heard of Opus Dei. After The Da Vinci Code, I never thought about Opus Dei again.
Albino monks. Secret bloodlines. Tom Hanks sprinting through the Louvre.
I filed it under &ldquo;fun fiction.&rdquo;
But Gareth Gore didn&rsquo;t come on my show to talk about Dan Brown.
He came to talk about money and power.
And that&rsquo;s why I wanted to talk to him.
<h3>The Bank</h3>
In 2017, one of Spain&rsquo;s largest banks collapsed overnight.
Banco Popular.
Gareth, as was his beat, was sent to cover it.&nbsp;
At first, the story looked simple: reckless executives, bad real estate loans, another ugly bank failure.
So Gareth wrote the same story everyone else wrote.
But something didn&rsquo;t sit right, so he kept pulling the thread.
At night. On weekends. Long after the official explanation had been printed and filed away.
And what he says he found was a Russian nesting doll of companies inside companies inside companies.
Same directors. Same addresses. The same names turning up again and again. More than a hundred million dollars a year allegedly flowing out through side doors.
And at the center of the maze, according to Gareth, was Opus Dei.
Gareth says the bank had been a cash machine for them since the 1950s.
That&rsquo;s how you accidentally write a book about one of the most controversial organizations on earth.
You go looking for a bank.
<h3>What Is Opus Dei?</h3>
Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by a Catholic priest named Josemar&iacute;a Escriv&aacute;.
The basic message is beautiful: You don&rsquo;t have to become a monk or a priest to be holy.&nbsp;
You can serve God through ordinary work.
Raise a family. Run a company. Practice law. Teach school. Do your job well. Make your daily life sacred.
That&rsquo;s the public-facing idea.
And for many members, that&rsquo;s exactly what it is: a serious, traditional path for living a disciplined spiritual life in the modern world.
But structurally, Opus Dei is unusual.
It is a &ldquo;personal prelature,&rdquo; which means it operates across borders under its own leadership, rather than being tied to one local diocese.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s where the controversy begins.
Critics, including Gareth, describe Opus Dei as secretive, highly disciplined, and intensely focused on recruiting people close to power.
Judges. Politicians. Journalists. Executives. Students at elite schools.
Defenders say this is a grotesque distortion. They say Opus Dei is a legitimate Catholic institution dedicated to prayer, work, family, and holiness.
So depending on who you ask, Opus Dei is either a respectable spiritual movement&hellip;
Or something else.
<h3>The Thing About Power</h3>
The big thing I took away from Gareth&rsquo;s book is this:&nbsp;
Real power doesn&rsquo;t announce itself. It doesn&rsquo;t wear a uniform. It doesn&rsquo;t sit on a throne. It works better when it looks boring.
A school. A foundation. A bank. A nonprofit. A dinner invitation. A friendly mentor who takes an interest in your career.
Gareth argues that Opus Dei built a machine for identifying promising people early, surrounding them, disciplining them, and moving them toward positions of influence.
Not in the cartoon way. Not secret tunnels under the Vatican. Not a hooded council meeting at midnight.
Something quieter.
A checklist. A network. A system that knows who will matter before the world knows they matter.
Gareth believes this is not just ancient history. He says versions of this are still happening now, including near Washington, D.C. and Silicon Valley.&nbsp;
<h3>Why This Matters Now</h3>
Some hear &ldquo;Opus Dei&rdquo; and think: Catholic conspiracy theory.
Others hear criticism of a Catholic organization and think: attack on the Church.
I don&rsquo;t think either frame is useful.
The better question is: How do powerful networks hide in plain sight?
Because Gareth&rsquo;s book is a story about institutions. How they recruit. How they protect themselves. How money moves through them. How influence compounds over decades.
How people can be made to feel chosen, indebted, guilty, special, watched, and useful all at the same time.
That&rsquo;s why I wanted Gareth on the show.
It&rsquo;s a power story.
I&rsquo;m going to stop there.
Because what Gareth says he put on the Pope&rsquo;s desk&mdash;and the part where he tells me Silicon Valley is running the exact same machine&mdash;you need to hear in his own voice.
It&rsquo;s one of the craziest conversations I&rsquo;ve had on this show.
<a href="https://lnk.to/Q6JqcR01">Go listen here</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-061526

The Sacred Art of Dark Money

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>