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

Billionaires are supposed to be ruthless.
David Rubenstein has hired former presidents. He's interviewed thousands of people. And he just told me on my podcast he could never bring himself to fire anybody.
Early on at Carlyle, the private equity giant he cofounded, he would have to fire someone.&nbsp;
The person would come into his office and explain how great they were at their job. And then somehow they'd walk out with a promotion.
His partners stopped letting him do the firing.&nbsp;
Then David bought the Baltimore Orioles.
In baseball, when the team loses, somebody has to get fired. Last year it was the manager, Brandon Hyde. Two years earlier, Hyde was Manager of the Year.
David's explanation: it's easier to remove the coach than the players. And owners don't tend to remove themselves.
He wrote a book about all this, Inside the Owner's Box. When he bought the team, he went and interviewed other owners to learn how to be one. Learn and write at the same time. I love that.
My first question: will there even be a baseball season next year? The players' contract runs out in December. The owners want a salary cap. The players hate the idea.
"Nobody knows," he said.&nbsp;
He said that a lot. Nobody knows who becomes a superstar. Nobody knows if AI creates jobs or kills them.
He's right. Most of the time.
Here's what I learned from David.
<h3>Money Doesn't Buy Wins</h3>
Since David took over, the Orioles have more than doubled player salaries.
The results haven't followed.
The Mets have one of the richest owners in baseball. No championship. The Dodgers spend big and win. Same strategy. Opposite results.
And the draft? In basketball and football, the top picks almost always make it. In baseball, the number one pick sometimes never reaches the majors. Cal Ripken wasn't a first-round pick. Tom Brady went in the sixth round.
Babe Ruth couldn't get a job managing. Earl Weaver never played a single major league game. He's in the Hall of Fame as a manager.
Credentials predict less than we think.
<h3>Shut Up and Walk</h3>
During the Orioles deal, a banker on the other side started explaining to David what debt is.
Sitting on David's side was Mike Arougheti, who runs the largest private debt business in the world.
A desperate buyer swallows that. David called it childish and hung up.
He was ready to walk away. He wasn't sure he was the right buyer, and he had plenty of other things to do.
Plus, he didn&rsquo;t want to seem desperate. He always avoided saying things like "I can't wait to get this deal done. My children want me to get this deal done. This is the highest priority of my life." Say that, and you're probably not an effective negotiator.&nbsp;
That's his rule. If the other side knows you'll put up with anything, you won't get the best deal.
He went back in eventually. A chance to own your hometown team doesn't come twice.
Just don't tell them your kids are begging you to close.
<h3>Why We Care</h3>
I asked David the big question. Why does a guy in Baltimore care if the Orioles win? It doesn't put bread on his table.
He said Baltimore has been the stepchild to New York, Boston, Philly and Washington for 200 years. When the Orioles win, Baltimore is as good as anybody.
Then he turned it on me. Why do I care about the Mets?
When I was a kid, it felt like I was winning when they won.
That's it. That's the whole business. Millions showed up for the Knicks parade. None of them own a piece of the team.
"Logic isn't everything in life," David said.
That's why he'll never sell. His parents are buried in Baltimore. He'll be buried there too. The team is his way of paying the city back.
As we wrapped up, he complimented my haircut. Then he asked if I'd ever owned a comb.
I'm 58. He told me that makes me a teenager.
He's sending me a comb. I'll let you know when it arrives.
<a href="https://lnk.to/JASDROC01">Click here to listen to the whole podcast</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-ISSUE-100726-1

“Shut Up and Walk!”

I'm nobody.
I said that to Bill O'Reilly on my podcast. He'd just told me he knows everybody. "Even you, James."
That's how you know he means everybody.
This was his third time on my podcast. At the end, he thanked me for reading his book.
"Many interviewers don&rsquo;t do that," he said.
Bill&rsquo;s written more bestsellers than I've written grocery lists. He goes on show after show. And the host flips to the back cover five minutes before airtime and asks, "So what's the book about?" That's how you get the same interview forty times in a row.
Maybe I&rsquo;m the only podcaster who reads every guest&rsquo;s book. I&rsquo;ve done it for over a decade. And I always learn something new and hear stories nobody&rsquo;s heard before.&nbsp;
Like this one&hellip;&nbsp;
<h3>How Often Does This Happen?&nbsp;</h3>
After the election, before Trump was sworn in for his second term, Biden's national security team needed to reach the president-elect. Hostages were sitting in Gaza. Netanyahu wanted Trump's sign-off on the mechanics of a deal.
They couldn't get through.
So Jake Sullivan called a friend of Bill's. Bill set up the call.
He moderated it. He offered no opinion. Trump was on the line and knew every detail, Bill says. About two weeks later, four hostages walked free.
I sat there thinking: how many phone calls like that happen every day that we never hear about?
Most of them. That's how the world works. The real story is almost always the one nobody reports.
Which brought us to talking about the media.&nbsp;
<h3>Why The Media Hates Good News&nbsp;</h3>
Bill knows how the media works better than anyone. He said they hate good news.&nbsp;
He pointed to a recent report&mdash;American households have more assets than ever, and the poverty rate is at a record low. He says CNN never mentioned it.
I pushed back. Americans have had record assets almost every year since 2010. Is that even news?
Bill's answer: the numbers are new, and they keep going up. Meanwhile all you hear about is gas and groceries.
He has a point. Fear sells. Fear always sells. I've been reading headlines for 40 years. If I'd traded on every scary one, I'd be broke. Actually, I have been broke. More than once. Usually because I listened to the scary headlines.
Then I asked him an uncomfortable question.
<h3>What About Bill?&nbsp;</h3>
Didn't shows like his start this? The O'Reilly Factor launched in 1996. Opinion all day. Didn't that open the door?&nbsp;
He said the Factor told you it was opinion. Every newspaper has an op-ed page. TV didn't. So he built one. Back then his audience was roughly 60% conservative and 40% liberal. He wanted it that way. He brought on people who disagreed with him and got into shootouts.
Now? Every channel brings in people who agree with the channel. Easy money. Preach to the choir and the choir pays.
Trump just kicked CNN, MS NOW, and Politico out of the White House. Bill has no love for any of them. Bill said it was a bad move.&nbsp;
"I would have shunned them," he said. Seats in the back. Never call on them. But never kick them out.&nbsp;
That's a business lesson, too. Don't fight the people who want a fight. Ignore them. Attention is oxygen.
<h3>A Life Fully Lived</h3>
I'll admit it.&nbsp;
I was more opinionated in this interview than I usually am. We talked about New York City, where I lived my whole adult life. We talked about Mayor Mamdani's plan for city-run grocery stores that charge 20% less.
Grocery margins are about 1%. Do the math. Every bodega near one of those stores goes out of business. The bodega owner opens at 6 a.m. and closes at midnight. He's the one who pays.
Bill agreed. You don't have to. Listen and decide.
But the part I keep thinking about came at the end.
In the book, Bill writes that his father's final words were about never reaching his potential. That's a heavy thing to hear from your dad. Some people spend their whole lives running from a sentence like that.
So I asked Bill: Have you reached yours?
I expected him to say no. Everyone ambitious says no. There's always one more mountain.
He said he's pretty much done everything. No more quests. He still wants to do a good show every day. But if someone walked in tomorrow and said, "O'Reilly, you're out," he'd say thank you.
I don't know if I'll ever feel that way.
But I'd like to.
Maybe that's the real potential. Being able to say "enough" and mean it.
The book is Confronting America: What Has to Change. The episode is live now.
Even if you disagree with Bill, <a href="https://lnk.to/JASBO101">the podcast is worth a listen</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-100226-Featured

Bill O'Reilly Knows Everybody (Even Me) 

The first time I saw Steve Jobs in person, I was jealous.
It was 1990. I was at Cornell, and Steve came to the Computer Science Department to convince the school to buy his NeXT computers.&nbsp;
They were these perfect black cubes, the most beautiful machines I'd ever seen. I would later write a chess program on one of them.
But nobody was looking at the computers that day. Everyone was looking at Steve. We all crowded around him just to study him up close, like he was a rock star who had wandered into the wrong building.
He was young. He was rich. He had charisma. I was a kid who didn't know what he was going to do with his life, and here was a guy who had already changed the world once and was trying to do it again.
I wanted to be him. I didn't know how. I still don't.
What I did instead, over the next thirty-something years, was buy almost everything he ever helped make.
The laptop. The phone. The watch. The headphones I lose every three weeks. If the Apple Store sold beds, I'd be sleeping on one right now.
So when Ron Johnson came on my podcast this week, I was a little starstruck.
Ron built the Apple Store. The Genius Bar. The whole thing.&nbsp;
Before that he ran merchandising at Target, where he hired Michael Graves to design teakettles and toasters, and suddenly a discount store had taste. Steve Jobs noticed. He asked to meet "the guy doing all the design work at Target."
Ron's new book is Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple's Genius. In it, he writes that one reason Steve hired him was that he was kind.
Kind. Steve Jobs. Same sentence.
I asked him about it.&nbsp;
<h3>What Ron Taught Me&nbsp;</h3>
Ron grew up outside Minneapolis. One winter a neighbor's husband died, and the kids shoveled her driveway before they shoveled their own. That's just what you did.
Steve spent his days with people who lived in their heads. Chips. Code. Specs. Ron lived in his heart. A retailer has to. The whole job is how a thing makes a person feel.
Here's what I learned.
<h3>1. Where you stand is your first sentence.</h3>
Steve told Ron the first thing Apple says to a customer is where it puts the store. Pick the wrong spot and every local knows instantly. They know where people park. Where they eat lunch. Where the tourists wander. You have to know the town better than the town does.
I think about this with everything now. Where you show up speaks before you do.
<h3>2. Hire from bookstores.</h3>
Old tech stores were full of guys tinkering with gadgets, avoiding eye contact. Terrifying if you were new to computers. So Apple recruited from bookstores. A good bookstore clerk asks what you've been reading and walks you to the right shelf.
That's the Genius Bar in one sentence.
<h3>3. Never hurry the customer.</h3>
Ron figured it took four or five visits before someone bought their first Mac. So he told his people: spend all the time they want. Thank them. Invite them back.
I did go back. For years. I'd walk into the Fifth Avenue store with nothing to buy and walk out smiling with an iPod, listening to music from my childhood I hadn't heard in decades.
<h3>4. Protect the sacred stuff.</h3>
Ron recently walked every home aisle at Target and compared it to what was there thirty years ago. Old Target won. Easily.
The culprit? The floors.
Target used to have white floors, polished every night. The colors bounced off them. It felt happy. About a decade ago somebody swapped them for dark gray concrete because it looked hip. Ron says that one choice drained the life out of the whole store.
Every business has a few sacred things. Institutional memory fades fast. If nobody writes down the Bible, someone paints over it.
<h3>5. Take the hit and fix it.</h3>
Apple opened its third store on a Saturday. Monday morning, Ron walked into the exec meeting. Steve looked up: "You haven't sold a computer in the state of Texas. What are you doing here?"
Ron sat down and said he'd fix it. Steve went after the work, every time, and Ron knew it. High performers love that. It makes you better.
<h3>6. Don't be in a hurry.</h3>
I asked for the best business advice he ever got.&nbsp;
Five words: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be in a hurry.&rdquo;&nbsp;
Under Steve, Pixar made one movie a year. Two would have doubled revenue. Steve refused. Apple waited six years after the iPod to make a phone. Three more for the iPad. You earn the right to do the next thing.
Right now everyone is throwing hundreds of billions at AI, terrified of missing it. Apple sits back and watches.
Maybe that's Ron's lesson scaled up to a trillion-dollar company.
Customers don't move at the speed of business. Neither does anything worth building.
This is one of my favorite podcasts of the year. <a href="https://lnk.to/JASRJ01">Click here to listen and see why</a>.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-092526-Featured

The Day I Saw Steve Jobs

Trump walked down a red carpet to meet a plane.
It's the first time a president has done that at Joint Base Andrews in 11 years. Presidents usually make visitors come to them.
But Wednesday night, Trump was waiting at the foot of the stairs when Xi Jinping stepped off his jet.
It's Xi's first U.S. state visit in more than a decade.
Everyone wants to know one thing.
Deal or no deal?
I've been in a lot of negotiations. Here's what I learned. Most people know this but they forget it in the excitement: The handshake is the least important part. The important part is what happens to the price after.
Summits end in handholds, photos, a banquet, and a statement that both sides "made progress."
Then the real work starts.
And the clock just got reset. Minutes after Xi's plane touched down, the Treasury Secretary announced the trade truce is extended to January 10.
Two more months. That's a window. Windows are where money gets made.
Look at what's on the table: trade, artificial intelligence, the Iran war and rare earth metals. And the question of whether Chinese carmakers get into the U.S. market.
Every one of those is a sector.
Every sector has a stock that moves first.
I'm watching a handful of them right now. Some already ran up before the summit. Some haven't moved at all. One of them I think the market has completely forgotten about.
I&rsquo;m not rushing in. Neither should you.
Right now, I&rsquo;m putting together all of my favorite tickers for Q4.
I&rsquo;ll tell you which ones I'm watching here in Altucher Confidential on Wednesday. Make sure you check it out.
By then the summit headlines will be old news. The TV pundits will have moved on. And the charts will start telling the truth.
That's when I want to be buying. Before the crowd figures out what happened.
Keep an eye on your inbox.

alc-09-24-26-featured

Trump Meets Xi. Follow the Money.

When I was four I got lost in a department store.
I ran through the aisles crying. Then I spotted them. Brown pants. Dark shoes. My dad's uniform. I ran over and grabbed on.
Not my dad. When I looked up, he laughed. I ran away screaming.&nbsp;
Looking back, I spent most of my life doing that.&nbsp;
Grab whatever looks solid. Money. Companies. People who seem sure of themselves. I'd hold on tight and then look up and realize I had no idea who I was holding.
I didn't get it at four. I get it better now, thanks to a physicist.
His name is Carlo Rovelli. He works on quantum gravity. Black holes. What happened before the Big Bang. And what it all has to do with living a good life. His new book just came out. On the Equality of All Things.
I got him on the podcast. Today I wanted to share how Carlo changed the way I think about everything. Literally.
<h3>A.] Nothing is fixed.&nbsp;</h3>
I&rsquo;ve gotten rich and gone broke in the same year. The big house went. Most of the friends went. They were friends with the money.
I sat there for months asking one question. Who am I without all of it?
Turns out physicists ask that kind of question too. Not about themselves. About everything.&nbsp;
What is a thing, by itself, with nothing around it?
Carlo said it&rsquo;s the wrong question. Physicists now understand that things are defined by their relationships. Nothing is fixed.&nbsp;
That&rsquo;s why "Who am I, really?" has no answer either.&nbsp;
Better questions do have answers. Who am I to my kids? Who am I to my friends? Who am I to the people who read what I write?
When I asked those, I had plenty to work with. The money was gone. Those connections were still there.
Stop digging for the real you underneath everything. Look at who you're connected to. That's the real you. That&rsquo;s where you are.
<h3>B.] Certainty kills learning.</h3>
After I sold my first company, I was sure I was a genius. I threw money everywhere. Sure of every bet.
Turns out, that's how you lose $15 million.
Carlo says every generation of scientists thinks it knows almost everything there is to know. Every generation is wrong.&nbsp;
Newton wrote his masterpiece and ended it by admitting he didn't know why gravity works. The people who discovered the most never thought they were finished.
I've started more than 20 companies. Most failed. The ones that failed biggest were the ones I was most sure about.
<h3>C.] We're not standing outside the universe.</h3>
Carlo kept saying one thing in different ways. We don't get a view from outside.
We're not gods looking down at the world. We're little animals in the forest looking around. Everything we know, we know from inside.
I used to think growing up meant getting to the balcony. Enough money, enough experience, enough therapy, and I'd finally get to look at my life from above and see what it really was.
Never happened. The balcony doesn't exist.
What exists is the aisle you're standing in. The chair you're sitting in. The person you're on the phone with. That's the whole view. Get good at that view
<h3>D.] Order happens on its own.</h3>
I tried one last time to get something solid out of him. Everything falls apart, right? Apples rot. Stones turn to sand. People die.
He said no.
Pour vinegar in a glass of water. It mixes forever. Pour oil in water and stir it. Wait. The oil separates. It finds its own shape. Nobody touches it.
Galaxies did that. Life did that. Cities did that.
I did that too. When everything fell apart, I didn't have a plan. I just kept going, one day at a time. A great life slowly formed around it.
Decay is real. So is order.
<h3>What I took away.</h3>
I spent an hour trying to get Carlo to tell me what&rsquo;s solid. What&rsquo;s real.
He said nothing is. Not even atoms. Everything only exists in relation to something else.
I was four years old again, holding a stranger's brown pants.
The whole lesson: look up and ask better questions. Who am I connected to? The friends I keep. The ideas I let in. The people I learn from.
That's the whole thing.&nbsp;
If you need something to do with this information: call someone you love. That call, and that person, is where you are.&nbsp;
And then <a href="https://lnk.to/JASCR">listen to the whole podcast right here</a>.

ALC-Issue-092326-featured

Strange Brown Pants

In 2004, I wrote a book called Trade Like a Hedge Fund.
I was a partner at a fund called Subway Capital back then. We traded arbitrage and short-term statistical setups. My partner Dan and I ran every system in that book..
The book had 20 strategies in it. No fluff. Just systems.
I taught people how to fade gaps. How to buy bankruptcies. How to trade the TICK, the QQQ crash, the 200-day moving average, option expiration day.
Jim Cramer said that I gave away too much. He said I could "ruin it."
<img src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/620PrOZHyFR9T4A97KLb3q/69cacc0d5d4476d0ae3425f30b47bda9/ALC-Issue-091426-1.jpg" alt="James Altucher trade like a HEDGE FUND" width="350" align="none" />
Nearly every edge in that book came down to the same idea. A window&mdash;a pocket of inefficiency that opens for a moment, then slams shut.
Technique 13 was called "Ten Percent Down&mdash;Panic 101." The market panics. A window opens. You buy the fear. Then it closes.
Technique 8 was the QQQ Crash System. Same idea. The crash creates the window.
Technique 12 was about the end of the month and the end of the quarter&mdash;windows that open on the calendar, like clockwork, whether anyone is paying attention or not.
I wrote it in the introduction. The market is full of "hidden pockets of inefficiency." And "those pockets are constantly changing."&nbsp;
They appear. You act. They vanish.
That&rsquo;s the whole book. Twenty ways to find a window and step through it before it shuts.
And it worked.
My best system in that book returned about 28% a year. The gap trade won 63% of the time. For a statistical trader grinding small edges, those were beautiful numbers.
But I am going to tell you the thing I missed.&nbsp;
<h3>The Window Whisperer&nbsp;</h3>
I could find the window. I could time it. I could tell you almost to the day when panic would crack the market open.
What I could never do was make it pay 100 times over.
My edges were small.&nbsp;
Half a percent on a gap. Two percent on a crash setup. I stacked them, I diversified them, I smoothed out the volatility&mdash;exactly like a hedge fund is supposed to. In the book I wrote, "No one system is a Holy Grail." I meant it. I still mean it.
But for 22 years, one question sat in the back of my head.
What if you could find the same window&mdash;and instead of squeezing 2% out of it, you caught the whole move?
I never had an answer I trusted enough to put my name on. For two decades.
Now I have one.
<h3>My AI Bet Just Changed</h3>
His name is JC Parets.&nbsp;
JC is one of the few on record who called the 2008 crash before the market fell 50%. Then, in 2022, with the market down 20% and everyone screaming recession, he went on Maria Bartiromo's show and told people to buy.&nbsp;
It was the exact bottom.&nbsp;
He called gold to $5,000 when it was trading under $2,000. It hit early this year. In December 2023, when the smart money swore Nvidia was a bubble about to pop, he said buy. Up 50% inside three months.
JC reads windows better than anyone I know. And he just changed my mind on the AI trade.&nbsp;
This Thursday at 1pm ET, JC is sitting down with me to walk through how he does it. We&rsquo;re calling it &ldquo;The 100X AI Window.&rdquo; He will show the exact day the next one opens&mdash;he believes it is before the end of this month&mdash;and the single trade he would put at the center of it.
If you&rsquo;re signed up, I&rsquo;ll hand you the name and ticker of my favorite stock from his watchlist. Free.&nbsp;
Don&rsquo;t tell Cramer.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-091426-Featured

My AI Bet Just Changed

In 2001, I had a chance to get in on the ground floor of SpaceX.
I laughed at it.
I rarely tell this story. It involves me, a phone call, and the worst seven words I ever said out loud.&nbsp;
But you should hear it. Because I&rsquo;m about to watch a few million people make the same exact mistake.&nbsp;
Here&rsquo;s what happened.&nbsp;
My friend had just sold his company&mdash;a deal I helped put together, to the same buyer that took my first company, Reset. Life was good for him. He had money, options, and time.
He called me up. "You should come out to Silicon Valley. I'm moving there. My old college roommate is starting a company. He wants to build rockets to send people to Mars."
I remember my exact words.
"That&rsquo;s the stupidest idea I ever heard."
Why would anyone want to go to Mars?
Understand the moment.&nbsp;
The dot-com crash had just vaporized trillions. Rockets meant NASA and only NASA. Mars meant science fiction. Despite Mars being beyond the point, every smart person I knew would have said the same thing I said.
That was exactly the problem. Every smart person agreed with me.
My friend&rsquo;s roommate, of course, was Elon Musk.
The sting faded, but the lesson didn't.&nbsp;
In 2012, while everyone was still skeptical, I published my case for how SpaceX would turn a profit. In 2015, I wrote how it would change the economics of space. And years before a single share traded, I predicted Elon would pull off the biggest IPO the world had ever seen.
I could have been in the building. I wasn&rsquo;t. But here&rsquo;s what I learned: When a plan sounds stupid, especially coming from Elon Musk, look closer.&nbsp;
Electric cars sounded stupid&mdash;Tesla is worth $1.5 trillion. Landing a rocket on its tail sounded stupid&mdash;SpaceX owns 80% of everything America launches. Beaming internet from space? Stupid. Starlink covers the planet.
And there&rsquo;s a reason you need to hear this now.&nbsp;
Earlier this year, Elon quietly filed a document with the FCC. No announcement. No tweet. Nothing. From a guy who sells flamethrowers for fun, silence is a signal.
I've read the filing. What's inside is bigger than Tesla, SpaceX, and X&mdash;combined. It solves the single biggest problem in the $25 trillion AI race. And it does it in a place none of his rivals can follow him.
I&rsquo;ve put all the details together in my free Millionaire Maker Masterclass.&nbsp;
But, before you check it out, I'll tell you this.&nbsp;
The moment you hear what Elon is actually planning, your first reaction will be word for word what mine was in 2001:
"That is the stupidest idea I ever heard."
Good. Now you know exactly what that means.
Tesla minted the Teslanaires. The SpaceX IPO minted thousands more&mdash;welders, machinists, cafeteria workers. This wave dwarfs them all. By my math, he&rsquo;ll make over a million new millionaires.&nbsp;
So now I've done something I've never done before. I&rsquo;ve created a blueprint on EXACTLY how to play it.&nbsp;
I put the entire story&mdash;the filing, the plan, the missing piece, the crucial suppliers, and the tickers&mdash;into our free Millionaire Maker Masterclass.&nbsp;
You don't need experience in the markets. And the research speaks for itself.
One warning: this all kicks off September 25th. After that date, I expect the headlines to catch up&hellip; and the window with them.
Twenty-five years ago, I hung up the phone. This time, I&rsquo;m going all-in.&nbsp;
<a href="https://pro.paradigm-press.info/m/2536220">CHECK OUT THE FREE MASTERCLASS NOW</a>

ALC-Issue-083126-Featured

2001: The Year I Blew It On SpaceX

I had Joseph Moore on the podcast this week.&nbsp;
He reads dead people's mail for a living. That's his job description. It's called being a historian, and apparently there's a PhD for it.
He wrote a book called How to Get Rich in American History. If you love money and hate history, you&rsquo;re still going to like it.&nbsp;
I went in expecting Rockefeller stories. Instead he told me about George Washington's diarrhea.
<h3>Martha&rsquo;s Money&nbsp;</h3>
In his mid-twenties, Washington was broke and, to make matters worse, he had a gambling problem.&nbsp;
Meanwhile, Martha Custis was the richest widow in Virginia and every man in the colony was lined up at her door.&nbsp;
Washington was maybe fifth in line. Tall, handsome, some military bravado. But certainly not the prize-winning stud.&nbsp;
He only had one shot to get with her. And the night before, he got sick. Bad.&nbsp;
He pulled himself together, showed up, and apparently did great, because she wrote him a letter afterward that Joe describes as &ldquo;the 1758 version of Netflix &amp; Chill."
Every cool thing Washington did after that was funded by him wooing a woman while suffering diarrhea. No small achievement.&nbsp;
Then there's Franklin.&nbsp;
<h3>Early to Rise, Deeply in Debt</h3>
Franklin printed pamphlets about the evils of debt. But it was all a front. He'd borrowed to buy his press, fallen behind, and the printer was threatening to repossess it.&nbsp;
So Franklin went to a family in Philadelphia and made an offer. I'll marry your daughter if the dowry covers my debts.&nbsp;
They said they didn't have that kind of money. Franklin said fine, mortgage your house. They declined.&nbsp;
He married someone else.
That's the pattern Joe kept finding across 300 years.&nbsp;
<h3>The Whole Family Goes to Jail</h3>
Steven Girard, a one-eyed cabin boy who became the richest man in America, borrowed almost everything he had to send one ship out.&nbsp;
If it sank, he went to debtors' prison. And in 1790 debtors' prison took your wife and kids too.&nbsp;
The ship came back. He paid the debt.&nbsp;
Then he spent the next forty years borrowing less and less until he was sitting on 75 cents of equity for every 25 cents of debt.
<h3>How to Get Rich in America&nbsp;</h3>
You might think the point of the story is to get in a bunch of debt and swing for the fences. But no. Debt doesn't make you rich.&nbsp;
Joe was emphatic about this. Opportunity makes you rich. Debt is how you reach in and grab as much of the opportunity as you can carry.&nbsp;
The people we remember grabbed once, got lucky, and then spent decades putting the leverage down.
That's the crux of Joe&rsquo;s book: Get rich by taking the risk. Stay rich by dialing it down.
He boiled 300 years down to five things.&nbsp;
&rarr; Solve other people's problems. &rarr; Take risks, because this is the least risky era in American history and we're the most risk-averse Americans ever. &rarr; Move to where the opportunity is. &rarr; Marry well, meaning someone who covers your dreams while you cover theirs. &rarr; And believe you can, because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that a positive attitude plus a savings habit predicted financial wellness better than income or inheritance.
Optimists live in mansions. Pessimists explain why you can't.
I asked him how much is enough. He said $2 million and half of Twitter would call him an idiot. He retired on it. Then his wife kicked him out of the house for asking too many questions about Foucault.
Get rich. Then dial it down. Then find something to do with your hands.
<a href="https://lnk.to/JSJAS01">Listen to the whole conversation</a>. It&rsquo;s great. Joe&rsquo;s great. I just wish he&rsquo;d written the book sooner. For everyone&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp;

ALC-Issue-82826-featured

Get Rich in 1776

In 2013, I was doing weekly Q&amp;As on Twitter. Someone asked me about Bitcoin.
It was trading at $60.
I said: &ldquo;bitcoin is a fad, or a scam, or a ponzi scheme, or worse.&rdquo;
<img class="aligncenter" src="https://images.ctfassets.net/vha3zb1lo47k/1rtLNtQIuyJS1qsXUvq8dt/1516d22de55deaad51710b6e480a6f53/ALC-ISSUE-08-10-26-IMG-2.jpg" alt="" width="540px" />
Then my friend Naval Ravikant flew to New York, stood at a whiteboard for an entire day, and showed me why I was wrong.
By the end I realized Bitcoin might be the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in finance&mdash;and I'd been in finance since 1999.
Three months after calling it a scam, I released my book Choose Yourself on a Bitcoin-only store I built myself.
I sold about 60 copies for a tenth of a Bitcoin each. Six dollars at the time. That tenth of a Bitcoin is worth about $7,000 today.
So, in a way, I sold 60 copies for $7,000 each.
I got reminded of all this last week in Paris.
I was at the Proof of Talk conference when an interviewer named Anna Tutova asked the one question I never escape:
"Didn't you call Bitcoin a scam?"
Here&rsquo;s the lesson I learned back then:
When something sounds insane, that's exactly when you should sit down with the smartest person you know and let them draw on a whiteboard.
In fact, that&rsquo;s exactly why I went to Paris in the first place.
I wanted to talk to some of the smartest people in the world about the most insane idea in AI.
<h2 class="subhead nbp">Why I'm All-In on Decentralized AI</h2>
Here's what else I told Anna in Paris: centralized wins the sprint. Decentralized wins the war.
Anthropic just raised $65 billion. OpenAI will raise $100 billion.
But what happens when the models keep getting bigger? You can't raise a trillion dollars. At some point the math breaks.
Decentralized networks don't have that problem. People all over the world contribute. The network compounds while the centralized players hit walls.
This is how the internet evolved.
Thirty years ago everyone ran Windows or Mac. Meanwhile, thousands of strangers were quietly building Linux. Today Linux sits at the core of nearly everything. The decentralized operating system won.
Same with news. CBS, CNN, Fox&mdash;centralized, run by a few people telling you what matters. Then the internet turned everyone into a news source.
AI is next. And the leader in decentralized AI, by far, is Bittensor&mdash;TAO.
TAO trades around $300. I said on camera: $3,000 by year-end. Long term, $50,000 to $100,000.
A handful of the 128 subnets are already the best in the world at what they do, and the only way to invest in subnets is through TAO.
<h2 class="subhead nbp">And Then I Made Everyone Mad</h2>
The interviewer asked about quantum computing cracking crypto.
Here was my answer: Quantum computing is science fiction.
It doesn't exist in any way that solves a real-world problem. I went to graduate school for computers. I work with quantum companies. Google solved a complicated math problem&mdash;good for them.
That's a demo, and a demo won't hack Bitcoin.
Maybe in a hundred years. Maybe I'm the guy calling Bitcoin a scam at $60 again.
But I doubt it. Because this time I've already been to the whiteboard.
I've made three famous calls now: the one I got wrong, the one I'm all in on, and the one nobody wants to hear.
Clip this email and grade me in a year.

ALC-ISSUE-08-10-26-IMG-1

The Worst Call I Ever Made

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;