2026 letter

Happy New Year from a (redacted) remote beach in Northern Nicaragua.

I am going to be very direct, this is a very difficult environment to be building. Unless you have a project that has impeccable taste (or is highly eccentric) you’re best off laying low and dabbling in new skills or wandering into creative pursuits.

The algorithms have been completely annihilated with slop. Imagine all the Indians and Pakistanis with access to Gemini and Grok (lol), just turbo-blasting your feeds with optimized slop. You’re aimless vlog or newsletter (like this one), you’re half-hearted e-commerce scheme etc etc is going to get euthanized in this environment.

Thats just where we’re at with stuff.

You’re better off learning a new language or picking up a guitar than starting most online businesses. You’ll be better off 3-5 years down the road when the “Brazilification” (wealth divide/high crime) of the USA will be so high anyways it won’t really matter.

Basically you have 3 more years left to escape the permanent underclass. Mass property seizures (wealth taxes) will start sweeping the USA shortly, and the wealthy class will start moving to smaller sovereign nations like Dubai, Singapore and Seychelles.

If you’ve made you’re money (ideally 3-5M liquid) you can sit in Tesla or Google stock and just ride the tech. Not even worth trying to nail the right humanoid or robot bet unless you’re getting early round deals. Bitcoin is still one of the best bets and still probably goes to $250k before 2030. Zcash has even more upside (think it hits 2k sometime in 2026) and is my second biggest allocation after Bitcoin. Can explain why but basically people much smarter than us (like Naval, Balaji, Cobie, Barry Silbert, etc) have supported the project and its easy to understand: its Bitcoin but private and encrypted (what original cyherpunks wanted). Resonates. This will run hard at some point, thats my ballsiest prediction of 2026.

If you’re still in survivor mode your best bet is to help local businesses get up-to-speed with AI tools or start an eccentric Youtube brand/media (if you’re already asking “doing what” its not for you – trust me – but all the best Youtube brands are having the most fun, I’ll just leave it at that). This is for the highly creative, funny, high-value, etc. I predict a lot of AI generated YT channels will start struggling soon. We saw this same pattern play out with SEO farms when content website schemes were printing money. Now its with video. Again, I can’t say this enough. If your content isn’t distinguishing itself from what the AI tools are already doing (and will be doing in 6 months lol) you’re going to be sterilized and forgotten. You will be lost in the slop.

For people to follow, @bowtiedbull on X is still one of the best in the game. Insanely good at predicting the future (basically said 5 years ago: long degeneracy, banks are zeros). Brandon Hong @brandank_cr (potential collaboration with him coming soon) is my biggest finance/crypto mentor and I’ve been in his inner circle for 3 years now. Diggy Dirk @dirkcryptodiggy also one of the best for pure chart setups in crypto.

Be very selective who you listen to moving forward. You’ve been warned.

Good luck.