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

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.

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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

Trump Meets Xi. Follow the Money.

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

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;

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;