No paid ads. No PR agency. No influencer deals.

Just clipping.

Most founders still don’t understand what it is. The ones who do mostly get it wrong.

Here is what I’ve learned scaling helping customers getting millions of cost efficient impression with Reach.cat.

What Clipping Actually Is

Clipping is not a content strategy. It is a distribution architecture.

The mechanic is simple. You produce long-form content, a podcast, an interview, a rant, and you systematically break it into short clips that flood short-form platforms. Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts. The long format feeds the short format. The short format builds the awareness. Awareness builds the brand.

But here is what most people miss: a long format is not a conversation. It is not improvisation. It is a succession of engineered short formats disguised as a monologue.

Every segment is designed before the camera rolls. Every subject must be memorable, concrete, and plausible. Each transition is deliberate. You need anger, desire, and suspicion in the right proportions. You need to understand what the dominant opinion is in your market and where the cracks are, where people secretly disagree, where they feel lied to, where they want permission to believe something different.

Expert Secrets’ author Russell Brunson calls this the Prolific Index. Too boring and nobody clips it. Too extreme and nobody believes it. The sweet spot is the slightly outrageous claim that is also undeniably true. That is the only raw material worth clipping.

Without that, nothing else matters.

Where This Came From

The clipping meta was born in the post-Covid chaos of 2020 to 2022. Andrew Tate was the first to systematize it at scale. He opened the model completely, anyone could clip his content, repost it, and earn affiliate commissions. Thousands of TikTok accounts ran in parallel. According to The Guardian, total impressions crossed 11.6 billion. His product, a digital education program (“The Real World”), reached eight figures in monthly recurring revenue with zero paid advertising spend. One of the best-performing infobiz operations in the world.

Luke Belmar took the same mechanic and internalized it. Between 400 and 600 videos produced daily. 250 to 400 million views per month. $100K monthly burn. This is not content. It is content infrastructure.

Then the startup world caught on.

Roy Lee built Cluely’s entire fundraising narrative through podcast appearances. He walked into rooms saying things that had no business being said out loud. The clips spread. The mindshare accumulated. $15M closed at a16z. The product itself was secondary. The awareness was the asset.

Calai.app posted 1,000 TikToks per week. A calorie tracker. A wrapper. A nine-figure exit.

MrBeast is now building Vyro, a dedicated clipping infrastructure platform. When the world’s largest individual content operation builds tooling for clipping, you pay attention.

The Three Strategies, Ranked by Chaos

There are three ways to run a clipping operation. They are not equally effective.

The first is the open incentive model. You publish a CPM rate, say $1 per 1,000 views, on a platform like Whop, and let anyone clip anything. Andrew Tate ran on pure affiliation. Today, the smarter version combines CPM with affiliation, because affiliation alone takes weeks to pay out. A clipper who earns their first dollar within 48 hours has a fundamentally different relationship with the campaign than one who waits two months for a commission. The 48-hour payout activates something. They believe it is possible. They double down.

The problem is chaos. Your brand gets clipped between OnlyF*ns promo and casino advertising. The juxtaposition destroys positioning. Open incentive at scale is a brand risk dressed up as a growth strategy.

The second is the internalized team model. Iman Gadzhi, Alex Hormozi and Luke Belmar all run this. You build a coordinated clipper network with dedicated accounts that post exclusively about your brand. No cross-contamination. You control the narrative, the account positioning, and the incentive structure. The chaos problem disappears. The coordination cost appears instead.

The third is done-for-you. This is what Reach.cat does for clients. Smartphones, proxies, clipping technology, tracking infrastructure, the entire backend, managed externally. For founders and infopreneurs who want the distribution without building the team, this is the current best option on the market.

On the infrastructure side, Reach.cat has also built what is arguably the best tracking backend in the clipping space. A detail worth noting: several agencies that oversell clipping campaigns quietly outsource their entire backend to Reach.cat. The client thinks they are buying the agency’s proprietary system. They are buying Reach.cat with a margin on top.

What Clipping Cannot Fix

Here is the conversation nobody is having.

Clipping is a top-of-funnel awareness strategy. It is NOT a conversion engine. It does NOT generate clicks. It does NOT close sales. It builds mindshare, and mindshare takes months to convert into revenue through organic brand gravity.

Most founders who invest $5,000 or $10,000 into a clipping campaign expect measurable revenue within two weeks. When it does not arrive, they conclude that clipping does not work. What actually happened is that they misunderstood the funnel position.

This is partly a product market problem and partly a dishonest agency problem. Some agencies promise results they cannot deliver because they have no incentive to educate the client. The client churns confused, the agency moves to the next one.

But there is a deeper issue. Clipping cannot save bad source material.

The founders who come to Reach.cat with 300-view YouTube videos and expect clipping to solve their growth problem are working from a wrong diagnosis. The clips are not the bottleneck. The content is. If the long-form is not engineered for clippability, if it does not contain the Prolific Index moments, the anger, the desire, the concrete claims, then distributing it at scale just accelerates irrelevance.

Clipping is a multiplier. It multiplies what is already there. Applied to weak content, it returns nothing.

The Platform Question

The one genuine uncertainty in this meta is not the technology. It is not the economics. It is the platforms.

Meta, YouTube, and TikTok are absorbing an accelerating volume of programmatic, low-signal content. The algorithms currently reward volume and engagement regardless of origin. That may not hold.

If platforms begin penalizing coordinated multi-account distribution, the open incentive model collapses first. The internalized and done-for-you models, which operate with more signal discipline, survive longer. But nobody knows where the tolerance ceiling is.

This is the only real bet in the clipping meta. Everything else is execution.

Why This Goes Mainstream

The clipping meta was built inside infobiz and personal brand ecosystems because those operators move fast and have high tolerance for experimentation. But the underlying mechanics, crowdsourced creativity, decentralized distribution, contained costs, are not specific to infobiz.

What keeps clipping expensive today is human labor. Clippers are paid per thousand views. Editors cost money. Campaign management costs time.

AI deflates all of that. The cost of producing a clip is approaching zero. The cost of managing a network of accounts is approaching zero. The CPM economics that currently make clipping a premium strategy will compress dramatically as AI tooling matures.

When the cost of entry collapses, the strategy becomes accessible to any B2C brand with a media budget. By 2030, a mainstream automotive brand or a pasta sauce manufacturer will run clipping campaigns the same way they currently run display advertising. The infrastructure will be commoditized. The execution will be automated. The only remaining variable will be the quality of the source material.

Which brings everything back to the same constraint it always was.

The content has to be worth clipping.

The guiding principle of my career over the last decade has been simple yet relentless: always ask where economic value will appear tomorrow, stay ahead of the curve, and move aggressively before markets turn into red oceans. I have lived by an experimental approach: trying things super fast, exposing myself fully with skin in the game, and building in public. I have written about this philosophy in my article Autistic Antisocial Money, where I described the necessity of acting outside the accepted frameworks of connivance capitalism and instead operating in the permissionless environment of software, crypto, and now AI. My methodology has been to feed the haters with my shortcomings and reward the fans by letting them join the journey. This approach led me to launch projects such as CheCoin, the first major French memecoin on the Binance Smart Chain with 12,000 holders in two weeks, and Tugan.ai, one of the earliest ChatGPT wrapper products for copywriting and ghostwriting technology.

Early Career: Dropout and First Experiments (2013–2016)

In 2013 I entered HEC after preparatory classes. Within three months I realized it was the school of the world of yesterday. My feeling was that the French elite had built a capitalism of connivance and nepotism, and that all of it would soon be replaced by robots, meaning software. I dropped out.

From 2013 to 2016 I explored online teaching, scaling one of the first elearning businesses before the model was fashionable. In 2014 I launched Pandanote.io, a note-taking application for students. The app reached 40k downloads but failed to find a sustainable market or monetization. It was nevertheless my first experience working with developers and bringing a product to life.

In 2016 I published L’Essentiel de l’Histoire Économique, a manual of economic history that became the number one seller in its Amazon niche. That same year I created my first structured online education business around economics, targeting students. This was before the wave of mainstream online courses.

Direct Response Marketing and Copywriting (2016–2019)

From 2016 I entered the world of direct response marketing with two associates. Our company, was dedicated to building offers in direct response marketing while maximizing product quality to increase lifetime value. At that time, the French Direct Response Marketing (DRM) market was a blue ocean, with competitors counted on one hand and Facebook Ads still offering extremely low CPCs.

We scaled lean-style infoproducts: starting with short ebooks, turning them into long guides, then into full courses, communities, and ecosystems. Over this period we generated more than ten million euros in sales, with return on ad spend (ROAS) sometimes exceeding seven.

It was during these years that I began practicing copywriting. Copywriting is the art of writing sales messages that turn visitors into customers, and customers into compulsive buyers. It is the world of Big Ideas : concepts that stimulate, provoke, and capture attention, the true bottleneck of the digital economy. One of the enduring lessons was that a single good sales text can change your life.

The Creation of Tugan Bara and MarketingUnderground.biz (2019–2022)

In 2019 I decided to teach marketing and copywriting under the pseudonym Tugan Bara, inspired by Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, the Russo-Ukrainian economist born in 1865. I could just as well have chosen Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, but the resonance of Tugan was stronger.

I launched the R-X program (for Revenus Exponentiels), a subscription delivering weekly teachings distilled from my experience. The product line expanded with Profits Mimétiques and Copy Insider. The customer journey began with a free plus shipping book, La Bible du Marketing Underground, which was offered free but charged around seven euros for delivery. The R-X subscription was initially priced at 9.95 euros per month, later raised to 29.95 euros and then 49.95 euros. Premium one-shot programs were priced at 997 euros.

The clientele ranged from high school students (some of whom earned fifty thousand euros a month at seventeen years old) to retired polytechnicians. The tone was antisystem, libertarian, and transparent. We taught everything in public: copy drafted on Google Docs, funnels built on Clickfunnels, campaigns tested live. At a time when most trainers recycled American advice on YouTube, this radical transparency resonated.

By the end, we had served nearly 8,000 clients with an average TrustPilot rating above four stars. It was the high point of French infopreneurship before the CPF (some absurd government subsidy program for elearning) and unethical closers damaged the industry’s reputation.

CheCoin and the Web3 Era (2021–2023)

In 2021, as the COVID period ended and the crypto bull market peaked, I asked myself a new question: I had been investing since 2017 (especially during the bear market of 2018–2019 where I took big positions) but who actually builds tokens? How are they launched and promoted?

The answer became CheCoin, launched on the Binance Smart Chain as a satirical “communist token.” The project quickly reached a fifty million dollar capitalization. The token then deflated. Our team never sold, neither at the top nor the bottom, and we still hold. Internet commentary accused us of scams and rug pulls without basis, but CheCoin was in fact the first French memecoin, long before the memecoin boom of 2024 with Pump.fun or the presidential tokens like Trump’s $TRUMP or Milei’s $LIBRA. Both horrible ideas.

The bullish thesis in 2021 was that blockchain would replace twentieth-century financial and payment infrastructure and that art, community, and creation would be reinvented through NFTs and community tokens. While payments and finance remain central to crypto, and the U.S. Genius Act of 2025 validates that intuition, most NFT projects did not survive the bear market.

The CheCoin experiment attracted projects to me for advising. I coached and advised around twenty crypto teams, ranging from DeFi protocols to gaming platforms, wallets, NFT communities, and VC funds.

In 2023 I published Token Titans: The Secret Playbook for Building New Web3 Experiences, NFT Communities, and DeFi Protocols, a synthesis of these experiences. It became the leader in its category despite the volatility of the sector.

In parallel, I acquired full ownership of Side.xyz, originally Forkchain, after merging with a SocialFi project. I bought out my associates and pivoted Side into a Web3 marketing and analytics technology.

The positive lessons of Web3 were the speed of innovation, avant-garde marketing techniques, and the accelerated product cycles of two to three weeks instead of years. The negative lessons were the toxicity: threats, calumny, and scams. 90% of entrepreneurs who tried Web3 once never returned, suffering post-traumatic disillusion, as noted by Andre Cronje in his article Why Building in DeFi Sucks.

AI, SaaS, and Fast Cycles (2022–2024)

In March 2023, after the release of ChatGPT, I realized that copywriting itself was about to be demonetized. With two associates I created Tugan.ai, a ghostwriting and copywriting software built on the ChatGPT API. We grew by leveraging three engines: key opinion leaders on Twitter, affiliate marketing through platforms like Rewardful, and churn reduction with Churnkey.

In less than two years we scaled to 60k paying users. In July 2024 we accepted an acquisition offer. It was a full cycle from creation to exit in under two years.

By then the market was saturated with SaaS products, each enjoying a moment of glory before sinking into a red ocean. Sam Altman called it the era of “SaaS fast fashion.” Launching software through APIs and “vibe coding” platforms like Lovable is easy, but maintaining market relevance and justifying recurring subscription pricing has become a nightmare. Lifetime pricing models may replace monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and annual recurring revenue (ARR) as more rational in this environment.

Reach.Cat and The Next Big Sh*t (2025–Present)

In 2025 I launched Reach.Cat, a CPM platform allowing brands to mobilize hundreds or thousands of creators on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, paying only for views. The platform integrates anti-bot and anti-fraud systems by design.

That same year I joined The Next Big Sh*t, a French business and economics newsletter. It has become the first francophone newsletter of its kind, combining my intellectual curiosity with the control of a distribution channel. As Russell Brunson often says, there is traffic you do not control, traffic you control, and traffic you own. Owning it is the goal. At the time of writing, the newsletter has 20,000 daily readers and should exceed 100,000 by 2026.

My thesis now is what I call the “One Person Conglomerate Funnel.” It has three steps.

• First, build an audience with content to create authority, reciprocity (as Robert Cialdini explained in Influence), and flex.

• Second, maintain a cash cow product generating between one and ten million euros annually to finance lifestyle, media production, and investment capacity.

• Third, take equity in companies in exchange for advising, cash, distribution, or combinations of these.

Businesses, Books, and Investments

My software ventures have included Pandanote.io (inactive), Tugan.ai (exited in 2024), Side.xyz (active), and Reach.Cat (active).

My Web3 projects include CheCoin and Side.xyz.

I have published three books:

• L’Essentiel de l’Histoire Économique (2016)

• La Bible du Marketing Underground (2019)

• Token Titans (2023).

My education businesses were Réussir ESH (inactive) and MarketingUnderground.biz under the Tugan Bara persona.

My newsletters include ArnaudLabossiere.com on Substack (here) in English and bonzai.pro/labossiere in French.

Here are some of my investments

• Biotech and longevity SPVs : BE Therapeutics, Cyclarity Therapeutics

• Web3 and crypto (through SPV and DAOs) : Cookie DAO, CTRL Wallet, Creator Bid, Glyph, Buzz Fun, Glitr, Leea, Amplifi, Diamante, OneClick, daitAI, Hermetica)

• Media/ads : Ad360.media, Reach.Cat

And for the full transparency, my crypto holdings include Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and Side (SIDE).

I currently reside between Budapest, Hungary and Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Conclusion

My trajectory has been one of searching for blue oceans and arbitraging geography to maximize meritocracy and sovereignty. From dropping out of HEC in 2013 to scaling and exiting SaaS by 2024, from launching the first French memecoin in 2021 to building audiences and investing in 2025, the throughline remains the same: build fast, in public, with skin in the game, and always look for where the next wave of value will emerge.

French Version in Vidéo :

Disclaimer. I’m not the most legit voice in this industry because I have nothing to sell. I used to, but not anymore. Today I invest in and scale businesses I actually enjoy. Biotech. Hardware. Security. Media. Stuff that makes me curious or makes me laugh.

Infobiz was never the endgame. It was just the tool. It gave me what Marx called the “primitive accumulation of capital”. The initial stack. The launch fuel. That’s what allowed me to exit the loop and reinvest elsewhere.

But I still love this game. I love teaching. I love decoding. That’s why I’m still talking. Even with nothing to sell.

Facts

Secret #1 - The Reality of the $1m Info-Biz Dream

Making your first million online is the baseline of dignity in the digital world.

The target isn’t random. It’s the default ambition when launching software, reports, or any online business.

One million a year means $2,740 per day. That’s 1,000 sales at $1,000. Or 2,000 at $500. Or 10,000 at $100.

The “million” still sounds impressive, but its economic reality has shifted.

There are millions of millionaires today. It used to be a rare status.

In 1959, Some Like It Hot — Marilyn Monroe was chasing a millionaire. A million then is ten million today. 100,000 millionaires in 1959. Over 22 million now.

We’re dealing with inflation in both money and millionaire status.

Secret #2 - The Infobiz Trifecta.

Success in infobiz doesn’t come from value alone. It’s not just about your skills or your ability to teach. That’s surface-level thinking.

What drives results is a trifecta. First, timing. Being early. Catching the wave when it forms, not when it crashes.

Second, calibrated perception. Authority. Legitimacy. Desirability. You’re not separate from your product. You are the product.

Third, value delivery. Not for clout. Not for the dopamine hit. But to last. To retain. To convert again and again.

There is no Lifetime Value (LTV) without delivery. No legacy without durability. This is not a game of attention. It’s a game of repetition. Of depth. Of staying in play while everyone else burns out.

Secret #3 - The Info Biz Red Ocean.

Infobiz is a red ocean. Market growth followed a square root curve (√x). Fast start, early plateau. The initial acceleration gave the illusion of infinite scale, but the ceiling came fast.

Human capital moved the other way. People flooded in late. The talent curve was convex. Entry happened after the curve bent. That’s when saturation sets in. Competition spikes. Noise overwhelms signal.

A blue ocean turns red the moment attention exceeds opportunity. That’s exactly what happened.

Today’s game is about operating in overcrowded waters. You don’t win with force. You win with precision. Not scale, not surface — depth. Not reach, but incision.

Secret #4 - The Laffer Curve of BS

Arthur Laffer, The Laffer Curve: Past, Present and Future, introduced a simple idea: beyond a certain point, more tax leads to less revenue. The same logic applies to bullshit in infobiz. Bullshit works, but only up to an inflection point. Past that, it backfires. And we’ve clearly crossed that line.

Rolex turned into Richard Mille at 350K. The Lamborghini got replaced by the private jet. Tai Lopez’s garage became the Palm Jumeirah mansion in Dubai.

The inflation of signaling has destroyed credibility. More hype leads to less trust, and less trust leads to fewer conversions. The audience is no longer impressed. They’re numb. Signal has collapsed into noise. In that environment, trust becomes rare. And like capital, it compounds. The only thing that still cuts through is brutal clarity. Not excess. Not theatrics. Just sharp signal.

Secret #5 - Ai and Extreme Relationship

Economic value today is polarized across two extremes. On one side, extreme technology such as LLMs, biotech, fintech, blockchain infrastructure. On the other, extreme relationship, either vertical where a guru leads an audience, or horizontal where a community builds shared meaning. Think of this as a horizontal axis. Everything that sits in the middle struggles to capture meaningful value.

Now add a vertical axis with abundance at the top and scarcity at the bottom. This creates a matrix. The center of that matrix, filled with average tech, average content, and average positioning, is where value disappears. Economic opportunity lives at the corners. Extreme tech with scarcity. Extreme relationship with scarcity.

AI now gives anyone the ability to self-educate. It can generate personalized learning paths, explain concepts in context, and simulate human coaching. Agents like Gemini can summarize the best YouTube videos, select the most relevant content, and deliver it in a sequence optimized for each learner. In this environment, long theoretical courses and exhaustive programs lose their appeal. Clients don’t want to sit through hours of structured content when AI compresses and personalizes it in seconds. This shift will undermine a large part of the traditional education business online.

The only viable answer, when mapped onto the matrix, is to move toward the highest possible form of relationship. Something direct, sincere, generous, and above all, scarce. Abundant relationships feel like TikTok. They are shallow, fast, and nearly impossible to monetize. Scarcity is easier to control and easier to price.

The future of infobiz lives at the intersection of Extreme Relationship and Scarcity.

Strategies

Secret #6 - “I Have Nothing to Sell”

The “I have nothing to sell” strategy comes before “sell like crazy”. Alex and Layla Hormozi executed it perfectly with Brio and Acquisition.com. For years they repeated that they weren’t selling courses. They positioned themselves as investors, not educators. Then they dropped high-quality content on YouTube, the kind of material that used to sell for two to three thousand dollars.

They wiped out the paid-course competition by giving away more value than others were charging for. They targeted only high-maturity entrepreneurs. No beginners. No support burden. No refund drama.

The result was extreme trust, massive reciprocity, and elite status. No low-ticket noise. No customer service sinkholes. Beginner clients tend to bring the lowest lifetime value and the highest rate of complaints. The Hormozis bypassed that segment entirely.

Luke Belmar used the same logic. Before launching Capital Club, he spent twelve to eighteen months releasing free longform content. Podcasts. Interviews. High-level material.

He mentioned the product but made it impossible to buy. Everyone knew it existed. But it was invite-only. Waitlist-only. That mix of rarity and reciprocity built massive anticipation. When the offer finally opened, rumors say it pulled in more than $10M on day one.

Secret #7 - The Alliance with the Multitude

The strategy is to sell nothing because the money comes from elsewhere. You align with the multitudes without extracting from them. You hold the line. I have nothing to sell. You exit the infopreneur model and evolve the game.

This is a natural move for creators who have already capitalized an audience. The audience becomes leverage, not a revenue stream. You shift from selling to signaling. No direct transaction. You don’t sell to them.

Instead, you monetize through dealflow and access. The audience becomes distribution for B2B deals, investments, and equity plays. You mention products you’re involved in. They buy from the companies. You profit through ownership, not through sales.

Minority stakes replace course funnels. Trust stays intact. Monetization happens offstage.

Secret #8 - Decentralisation and Delegation of the organic growth

Strategy decentralize and delegate organic content

Decentralization

Andrew Tate used Hustler’s University to build a decentralized content machine. He let users repurpose and clip his videos freely. Thousands of TikTok accounts started pushing his content in parallel. According to The Guardian, the total impressions surpassed 11.6 billion. At his peak, he became the most googled man on earth. His provocative tone acted as an amplifier, turning controversy into velocity. The system was open. Anyone could join. Anyone could earn. That openness created massive scale, but also uncontrollable chaos.

Delegation

Iman Gadzhi built a delegation-based content engine. He structured internal teams with project leads, each managing multiple sub-channels across platforms. Teams operate under strict KPIs, compete on performance, and are incentivized by results. This creates controlled, repeatable scale instead of relying on lucky spikes.

Luke Belmar runs the same model at industrial scale. Between 400 and 600 videos are produced daily. The machine pulls in 250 to 400 million views per month. It runs on a $100K monthly burn. This isn’t passive virality. It’s operationalized reach. Content is deployed like infrastructure, not like art.

Tools like Reach.cat can help structure and manage growth campaigns with the same architecture.

Secret #9 - The $20m VSL Flywheel

The old model was linear and fragile. You create content. You place a link in the bio or description. That link leads to a landing page. Then a sales video. Then finally a checkout page.

At every step, the funnel bleeds. Very few people click the link. Even fewer leave their email. Most don’t finish the VSL or the webinar. A tiny fraction reaches the actual offer. Lead attrition is extreme. Most of your audience never even sees the pitch.

The new model, illustrated by Iman Gadzhi’s VSL Flywheel, flips the logic. Videos lead to other videos instead of external links. The entire structure is designed to stay native. YouTube rewards creators who keep viewers on-platform. Retention is the game, not extraction. Sending traffic away from YouTube reduces reach and kills momentum. Keeping users inside the ecosystem aligns with the algorithm, and the algorithm becomes your ally.

The VSL Flywheel places a central sales video directly inside YouTube. All the content around it is designed to point back to that one video. Every short, every long-form, every podcast clip builds context. By the time the audience reaches the VSL, they’re already warm. They’ve consumed hours of related content. Trust is established before the pitch even starts. There’s no landing page friction. No email gate. No external redirect.

The result speaks for itself. 10M views on the VSL. $20M in sales. $270,000 in YouTube AdSense revenue. The entire sales engine runs natively, powered by the algorithm itself.

Secret #10 - The 4L Method on Warm Traffic

Hot traffic meets the 4L strategy: low cost, low tech, low human, low complexity.

It means stripping away a decade of marketing-engineering bloat. No funnels. No automations. No CRM labyrinth. The stack gets reduced to the absolute minimum. The goal is clarity, speed, and execution without friction.

Sublaunch is the 4L funnel in action. It has already processed $20M for clients. Traffic comes for instance from TikTok and Instagram. Users land on a single Sublaunch page. They pay and get instant access to a private Telegram group. There’s no Skool, no login barrier, no new platform fatigue. As soon as payment stops, Sublaunch auto-kicks them from the group. Everything is automated without adding complexity. No team is needed. No backend tech jungle. Just content, traffic, conversion, access. Cheap, fast, direct. This is the future of hot traffic monetization.

Secret #11 - The iClosed Closing Funnel on Cold Traffic

For cold traffic, the current winning formula is the iClosed funnel. It starts with a short video ad that sends viewers to a minimal presentation page. No fluff, no long-form copy, no scroll fatigue. Just enough to filter and qualify. Underneath sits the iClosed form. iClosed outperforms Calendly with 21% higher conversion and 30% more leads captured. It handles scheduling, follow-ups, SMS reminders, and even the closing process.

The average ticket size is €2300 in Europe and $5000 in the US. Offers are typically coaching, mentoring, or other high-ticket support. Infoproducts can take you to $1M, but done-with-you and coaching can push toward $10M. The ceiling is higher, but so are the costs. This is not 4L. You need staff, coaches, and operational infrastructure. Still, it remains one of the most effective cold traffic machines in the game right now.

Secret #12 - The build-in-public fallacy

Build in public is a trap. You trade alpha for ego. Alpha is your edge. Ego is likes, views, and dopamine. When you reveal your secrets, metrics, and performance, you’re not converting buyers. You’re attracting clones. You feed the crickets, hoping they won't bite, but they bite anyway. They copy you for free while you bleed signal. Levelsio on X is one of the loudest proponents of this strategy, but his market is different. He sells tools and services to digital nomads, indie hackers, and wannabe builders. For that audience, exposure converts. If you’re not selling to them, build in public just leaks your edge into a void.

Building in public only works if your audience is made of entrepreneurs. If you’re selling to builders, indie makers, or wannabe hustlers, then exposure might convert. But if that’s not your market, you’re just leaking strategy to people who will never buy. You’re giving away asymmetric edge in exchange for short-term attention. Building in public leads to mimicry, not defensibility. Transparency and voyeurism are rarely winning strategies. Protect the edge. Don’t distribute signal for a dopamine hit.

Perspectives

Secret #13- Asymmetric Events and Processes

A career in infobiz runs on process and asymmetric events. The process is slow compounding. One to two to three percent per month. Linear, consistent, reliable. No home runs, just motion. But process isn’t scale. Scale comes from asymmetric events.

A single ad that hits. A single funnel that converts like crazy. One offer that floods the system with affiliates, spikes ROAS, attracts sudden media attention, and generates a temporary moment of hyper-profitability.

These moments break the curve. Then it's back to the grind. Back to the process. Until the next spike. One, two, maybe three asymmetric events over a full career is enough to build multi-million capital. Infobiz is not a game of consistency. It’s a game of volatility. Controlled. Surfed. Timed.

Secret #14 - The Saas-Info-Biz Axis of Evil

Every infopreneur eventually hits the same wall. Credibility. Or more precisely, the lack of it. Banks, VCs, and so-called real entrepreneurs see you as a scammer. No matter your numbers, you get the side-eye. Selling courses feels dirty in high-status rooms. You’re not seen as a builder. You’re seen as a marketer. The game becomes socially fragile. You make money, but lose narrative power.

The reflex move is to launch a SaaS. Alex Becker did it with Hyros. Iman Gadzhi with AgencyFlow. I did it with Tugan AI (that I sold recenlty after scaling to 60k paid customers). The audience built through infobiz is funneled into the SaaS. The same affiliate structures, the same traffic engines, now repurposed for MRR. SaaS brings long-term value. It brings exit potential. It gets you in the room. Infobiz gives you cash. SaaS gives you legitimacy.

The reverse also works. SaaS founders bolt on infoproduct offers to boost profitability. If you’ve got 19,000 free trials or active users, you only need to convert 1,000 of them to a $1,000 course to generate $1M in instant cash. That kind of liquidity is nearly impossible to extract from SaaS alone in a short period of time. SaaS is credibility. Infobiz is cash. You need both.

Together they create a self-reinforcing loop. One milks. The other legitimizes

Secret #15- The Coming Info-Biz Bull Run

The infoproduct space might be heading for a bull market. This, despite red ocean dynamics, saturation, and rising competition. Millions of white-collar workers are entering panic mode. Consultants, managers, HR people, analysts. Entire sections of the tertiary sector are waking up. AI gives them leverage, but also introduces existential dread. It amplifies their output, while forcing them to confront a deeper question. Am I still useful? And if so, for how long? That single shift in mindset is enough to trigger massive demand for reskilling, reinvention, and alternative paths. And that demand is going to land online.

Mass layoffs are setting precedent. Musk cut 78% of staff at Twitter. Microsoft has laid off 27,000 people since 2022. Salesforce, 9,700. Meta, 24,600. These are not isolated events. They are structural signals. We call it “The Secret War Against the 9%”.

Private equity and activist investors will ask the obvious question. Why carry bloated headcount when software can do the job. Replace human overhead with automation. Cut the fluff. Keep the leverage.

This is a high-income, high-education demographic. They are now disposable. And they know it. That’s why they’ll need to reskill. Fast.

Infobiz becomes the lifeboat. Not the scammy one. The real one. The new elite classroom.

Overlay this with the Mammoth Instacoach Curve. It used to be you had to hunt in the snow for food, risk your life for calories, face cold, injury, starvation. Now you can earn six figures giving mindset tips on Instagram. Thanks to technological progress, the complexity required to justify income has collapsed over time.

Technology deflates difficulty. Tasks that used to demand teams and capital can now be done solo, from a laptop. White collars are waking up. They see the shift. They feel the gap closing beneath their feet. Infoproducts offer both leverage and perceived safety. That combination is rare. And it's the setup for a bull run in digital education.

Secret #16 - The Proof of Humanity Membership Economy

AI accelerates the rise of the Dead Internet Theory. The idea is simple. There are no humans left online. Only bots talking to bots. Software engaging with software. Algorithms feeding other algorithms without realizing it.

Twitter already proves it. A massive share of the audience are bots. Yuval Noah Harari flagged it in Nexus. Freedom of speech becomes a strange question. Do bots get free speech.

Deepfakes. Bots. Auto-generated content. Fake comments. Fake likes. Fake followers. The web becomes pure noise. No signal. Internet turns synthetic.

The infobiz response is gated communities. Private memberships. Human-only spaces. One of the few effective filters is money. Bots don’t pay subscriptions.

Proof of humanity becomes strategic. You must prove you're real to engage. This could evolve into on-chain proof of humanity.

AI is digital abundance and fake. Blockchain is digital scarcity and real.

That tension will define the next decade of internet business. Those who prove they’re real will own the trust layer

Secret #17 - The End of the $1m Glass Ceiling

We’re witnessing the end of the million-dollar ceiling in infobiz.

For years, one million per year was a hard cap. Getting to twenty, fifty, eighty thousand a month was doable. But crossing the million mark meant hitting operational walls.

Suddenly you needed a team. But the team underperformed. You became a manager instead of a builder. High ad spend crushed your ROAS. Tools broke at scale or became stupidly expensive. Sending five hundred thousand emails on ActiveCampaign made no economic sense.

Processors couldn’t handle volume. One $500k webinar and your Stripe account could get nuked. Neo-banks froze your funds. The infrastructure punished scale.

Now that ceiling is breaking.

New infrastructure is arriving for high-volume creators. Tools like Bonzai.pro handle payments, user onboarding, and product delivery. New processors like InflowPay are built for aggressive scale. They want the new generation of creators to grow fast.

Scaling to multi-millions is finally infrastructurally viable. The bottleneck is no longer tech. It’s you.

Secret #18 - The Taylor Swift Method

Technological progress forces us to ask what still holds value.

The music industry asked that question two decades ago. Napster and P2P piracy destroyed traditional revenue. Between 2000 and 2010, global recorded music revenue dropped from 36.9 billion to 15.9 billion dollars. That’s 21 billion wiped out. In the U.S. alone, the industry fell from 14.6 billion in 1999 to 6.3 billion in 2009. A collapse of 8.3 billion.

iTunes slowed the fall but didn’t stop it. It was deflationary. Selling singles instead of albums. Value per unit of content collapsed.

The industry pivoted fast. From selling music to selling experience. From content to connection. Concerts became the new core business. Entertainment became the monetization layer.

Humans pay for live connections. They want physical presence. Shared time. Social proof. Screens record it, but bodies show up.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour made 2 billion dollars. It could have made 3 to 4 billion if ticketing hadn’t been broken. Scarcity, real-time, and co-presence create economic gravity.

Infobiz must learn the same lesson. Education and insight still matter. But the packaging must shift. The future is live, embodied, and collective.

The AI world will flood the web with infinite content. But it can’t replicate the real room. Business models must move toward experience, not just knowledge.

Secret #19 - Learn from web3 … even if you hate it!

Contrarian thesis on Web3.

I worked in Web3. It’s arguably the hardest arena in the world for marketers today. In 2017 and 2018, mediocrity could still win. In 2021, you needed some fundamentals. In 2025, it’s unforgiving.

Roughly 100M tokens are expected to launch by the end of 2025. Almost all will fail. Fraud is rampant. Noise is overwhelming.

Web3 marketers are trained killers. They operate in the most competitive environment on the internet. And they often sell nothing. No product. No tech. No working utility. What they sell is narrative. Social gravity. Perception. Hope.

Web3 forces marketing to its purest form. Community becomes distribution. Culture becomes the moat. Narrative becomes the product.

There are real lessons here for Web2 and for infobiz. Roles and privileges are used as reward systems. Status inside the community becomes its own form of currency. Visual identity is standardized through PFPs and naming conventions. Symbolic coherence emerges, like the .eth suffix. Growth happens through collective quests, action loops that mobilize the base.

Web3 mastered synthetic tribe-building. Infobiz hasn’t caught up. The first to port those mechanics into education and info products will dominate. Web3 wrote the new marketing playbook. Infobiz just hasn’t read it yet.

Secret #20 - The Keiretsu Way.

The final trend is the conglomeral move.

Keiretsu are Japanese conglomerates. Originally derived from the Zaibatsu, they were restructured after the war into a more decentralized form. Mitsubishi is the classic example, founded in 1870. Today it's active in automotive, finance, insurance, real estate, aerospace, chemicals, and electronics. Keiretsu is architecture designed for volatility. It's sectoral diversification built to absorb asymmetric shocks. A long-game hedge against systemic chaos.

South Korea took the model and scaled it. The Chaebols emerged as family-owned megaconglomerates. Ten families now control 60 percent of South Korea’s GDP. Samsung. LG. Lotte. Lotte runs real estate, hotels, supermarkets, shipping, and chemicals. They built the Lotte Tower, the tallest building in South Korea and one of the tallest in the world.

Infopreneurs can follow the same structural logic. Move from single product to portfolio. From brand to organism. From narrative to architecture. Two paths exist. Either own multiple info businesses in distinct verticals, each with its own positioning. Or diversify outward and build across layers — infoproducts, SaaS, live events, media arms, investment vehicles, even hard assets.

Greenbull is one of the rare examples already playing this game. They run financial software, online communities, real estate agencies, events, crowd-investment platforms. They hold restaurant equity. They operate across multiple countries. They control media distribution.

This is what maturity looks like in the infobiz space. The real exit is not a liquidity event. It’s building a structure that can survive you.

The conglomeral move is the high-stakes endgame.

What is an economic system

An economic system is a coherent set of mechanisms, institutions, and rules that organize the production, distribution, and consumption of resources within a society.

It’s the structure through which a society answers three fundamental questions:

• What to produce?

• How to produce?

• For whom to produce?

It articulates multiple dimensions:

• Ownership logic (private, public, collective).

• Coordination mechanisms (market, hierarchy, planning, networks).

• Resource allocation modes (prices, quotas, needs, rights).

Examples:

• Capitalism is based on private ownership of production means and market coordination.

• Communism rests on collective ownership and centralized planning.

No economic system is ever “pure.” In practice, every system is hybrid.
France, for example, is not pure capitalism but a mixed economy: market + state + redistribution + social norms.

Why ask this question now ?

Because : Yes, people, this is is different

• Tech-driven Deflation: AI and technological advancements significantly reduce production costs, causing structural deflation (see Booth, The Price of Tomorrow)

• AI-driven Egalitarianism: Everyone accesses identical AI tools (GPT, Google, Netflix), reducing economic advantages from exclusive knowledge or information.

• Post-Labor Economics (PLE): Traditional labor (trading human effort for wages)is becoming outdated due to AI-driven efficiency.

• Mass Corporate Extinction: AI's capability to automate tasks threatens numerous industries, notably SaaS, tech services, finance, law, and education.

• Decline of IQ Relevance: Intelligence (IQ) loses economic value, similar to physical strength post-industrial revolution.

• Machine-driven Mass Unemployment: Automation via software and hardware (robots, autonomous vehicles) will displace vast numbers of workers, transforming labor markets profoundly.

• Emergence of AGI/ASI: Advanced AI and superintelligence debates highlight imminent, transformative changes in society and economy.

• Economic System Reinvention: Just as the Industrial Revolution ended feudalism, AI necessitates a fundamentally new economic structure adapted to post-labor realities.

Scenario 1 – Technofeudalism

What is Technofeudalism :

• Yanis Varoufakis uses the term techno-feudalism to describe the emerging post-capitalist system.

• It’s not late-stage capitalism, it’s something else. A shift in the mode of production, not just an evolution of the old one.

• Simple definition: Techno-feudalism is a system where wealth no longer comes from exploiting labor in a competitive market, but from rent extraction by private digital platforms that control access to the economy.

• Technofeudalism differs fundamentally from capitalism by redefining control, power, and economic relationships through technological infrastructure rather than traditional market dynamics.

• In capitalism, wealth primarily emerges from owning and managing capital, labor, and production. Market competition, property rights, and profit maximization dictate power dynamics.

• Technofeudalism, however, replaces these market-driven dynamics with monopolistic control of digital infrastructure : platforms, data, algorithms, and network effects. Power shifts from capital ownership to gatekeeping of digital access and proprietary technologies.

• Platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Meta become feudal-like entities, extracting rents and data from users dependent upon them.

• Under technofeudalism, profit is not solely derived from productive innovation or competition but from monopolistic dominance, surveillance-based data extraction, and perpetual user dependency.

• Economic relationships transition from capitalist voluntary exchanges toward digital serfdom, where participation is necessary but not empowering, creating permanent asymmetries in wealth, influence, and autonomy.

• In short: capitalism relies on market forces, property rights, and competitive profit-seeking. Technofeudalism thrives on centralized technological dominance, digital rent-seeking, and structural dependency.

Productive forces: digitalization, data, algorithms

Production tools are no longer machines, but algorithms, servers, networks.
Data is the new raw material. Human labor becomes peripheral.
Platforms (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Alibaba, Tencent, Palantir...) are the lords of the new regime.

Relations of production: platforms & vassals

• In capitalism, firms produce goods sold on markets.

• In techno-feudalism, platforms produce almost nothing. They own the gates to the markets, they are proprietary intermediaries.

You’re not “employed,” you’re a vassal of a platform (Uber, YouTube, Shopify...).
You don’t sell in a free market, you rent the right to exist inside a closed digital space.

You’re subject to their algorithms, opaque rules, and taxes (20–50% commissions).

Varoufakis:

“Under techno-feudalism, the cloud capitalists are lords, and we are their serfs, paying rent to access the digital land.”

End of market, end of competition

• Prices are no longer set freely by supply and demand. They’re manipulated by platforms. Example: Amazon decides which seller is visible. Facebook decides which content is seen.

• There’s no market in the “Hayekian” sense. Just walled gardens with total surveillance.

Money and capital become secondary

• In capitalism, the engine is capital seeking profit.

• In techno-feudalism, capital is replaced by access control.

It’s not “I produce and profit,” it’s: “I control the flow and collect rent” (subscriptions, commissions, ads, data).

Money itself is bypassed. Apple can block your access to your audience. No need for a bank freeze. That’s more powerful than a state.

Role of the state: vassalized or complicit

The state is no longer sovereign. It’s either complicit (through favorable regulation) or vassalized (dependent on data, infrastructure).

Example: public administration uses Microsoft, schools depend on Google, intelligence agencies rely on Palantir.

Conclusion:

Techno-feudalism is:

• End of competition.

• End of the traditional capitalist class.

• End of classic wage labor.

• Extreme centralization.

• Algorithmic rent as core engine.

• A historical regression disguised as technological progress.

Scenario 2 – Gosplan AI

What was the Gosplan (1921-1991) and why it failed?

Gosplan was the Soviet Union's State Planning Committee responsible for centralized economic planning. Across the USSR the Gosplan :

• determined production targets

• allocated resources

• coordinated economic activity

Gosplan translated ideological objectives into concrete numerical quotas, forming the backbone of Soviet command economics. Famously associated with Five-Year Plans, Gosplan aimed for rapid industrialization, collectivization, and economic self-sufficiency.

Critics argue Gosplan created systemic inefficiencies and chronic shortages due to unrealistic targets and lack of market signals (prices).

What is Gosplan AI?

The economic system of a Gosplan-AI would function like a brain, not a market.

It’s a system centered on perfect information, real-time forecasting, and full algorithmic coordination.

• No prices.

• No market.

• No profit.

Only data flows and AI-driven allocations, like a central nervous system.

General structure: the economic “cortex”

• A central AI (or a network of interconnected models) becomes the supreme coordination node.

• It continuously receives data from every sector: production, consumption, transport, energy, health, education, environment…

• This AI models the economy as a cybernetic system: inputs, outputs, feedback loops.

• It learns, corrects, anticipates.

• It acts like a homeostatic regulatory organ.

Planning mechanism: dynamic optimization

The “plan” isn’t fixed (as in the USSR). It’s permanent and adaptive.
It’s predictive control, like in robotics.
At every moment, the AI:

• Evaluates stocks, needs, productive capacities

• Anticipates shocks (climate, logistics, social)

• Updates production decisions

• Allocates resources (labor, energy, raw materials, human attention)

You get macro-planning (strategic objectives) and micro-distribution (who produces what, for whom, when, where).

Role of economic agents: functions, not owners

There are no “companies” in the capitalist sense.

Production units are functional entities within the plan, like organs in a body.
Humans are assigned to productive or creative roles based on:

• Their marginal utility

• Declared preferences (as much as possible)

• Global constraints (ecological, energetic, social)

Wages? Optional.

Incomes could be calculated as access rights to consumption, based on contribution, needs, or equality principles. We can think about an adaptive universal basic income.
Money becomes a coordination tool, not a speculation tool.

Role of money (CBDC)

• CBDCs are personalized allocation interfaces.

• They let the AI track every agent’s economic behavior in real-time.

• They’re programmable: money can be geolocated, time-limited, conditional (e.g., food subsidy usable only for certain products, in a zone, at a time).

• Money isn’t for “profit.” It’s for coordinating flows.

Innovation, testing, feedback

Innovation no longer emerges from market competition.

It’s orchestrated by the system:

• Identify high-potential sectors

• Allocate experimental resources

• Evaluate in real-world conditions (systemic A/B testing)

• Integrate successful variants into the plan

It’s close to evolutionary planning, Darwinian computation by AI.

Incentives and motivation

Motivation becomes intrinsic and status-based: social recognition, algorithmic status, reputation.

A kind of economic social credit could emerge: Your “contribution score” determines access to goods, services, privileges.
Already embryonic in China.

Full loop example: food production

1. AI detects rice stock shortage in a region.

2. Models local demand, weather, agricultural capacity.

3. Reprograms logistics, allocates more land to rice.

4. Modulates rations to prevent shortages.

5. Redirects CBDC credits to rice substitutes.

6. Ensures nutritional balance.

All without prices, markets, or private firms. Just signals, flows, optimization loops.

In summary

You move from: A chaotic, self-organized, decentralized market to a central, adaptive, algorithmic, total planning brain.

The original Gosplan was run by humans. The Gosplan AI is run by algorithm.

Information becomes sovereign raw material.
Humans become decision nodes in a graph.
The economy becomes a goal-driven algorithm.
It’s post-monetary cyber-communism.
Or a perfect economic panopticon, depending on who runs the machine.

Scenario 3 – Individual Incorporation

What is the scenario of The Unincorporated Man?

The Unincorporated Man (Dani & Eytan Kollin, 2009) describes a dystopian ultracapitalist system pushed to its logical extreme:

• Every individual is a publicly traded company.

• Core principle: human incorporation

• At birth, each person is incorporated.

• You become a legal economic entity, listed and tradable.

• You don’t own yourself 100%.

• You start with 49% of your shares. The rest is held by: 20% for Parents (initial investment) 5% for the State (social investment), then private investors (education, housing, healthcare)

• You must buy back your shares to gain autonomy, but usually can’t.

• If you own stock of a person you can direct an audit.

• You can’t opt out of incorporation (it’s social heresy).

• That’s why the hero, Justin Cord, is scandalous: cryogenically revived, he’s the only unincorporated man. He owns 100% of himself.

The human market: life speculation and choice restrictions

• People sell shares of themselves to fund education, mobility, and projects. In exchange, they sacrifice choice.

• Shareholders can vote on major life decisions (career, marriage, location) if they hold enough equity. You’re literally under market pressure. You must perform. Be “profitable.” Maximize output. This is shareholder totalitarianism.

• End of individual freedom. You’re no longer a person. You’re a living asset. Rated, modeled, tracked, managed.

• No longer labor vs capital. You (labor) are capital. Everyone becomes both a startup and a financial product.

State’s role: infrastructure + market policing

• The state is not socialist or authoritarian. It’s a neoliberal technocracy, obsessed with market fluidity.

• It’s forbidden for the government to have any monopoly (including on the justice system). Government collects profits on the 5% of all incorporated humans (40Bn humans) and they have to spend it.

• It protects property, contracts, and transparency. But not autonomy (redefined as tradable personal capital).

Economic and social consequences

Everything becomes transactional: friendship, love, family, work.
High performers attract top investors and get more autonomy / or get richer.
Low performers remain in lifelong soft exploitation via equity debt.

There are no social classes in the Marxist sense, just people who own their majority and people who don't.

Just a fluid hierarchy of individual financial valuations. It’s no longer man exploited by capital. It’s man as capital, taken to the absurd.

Money

Every entity = currency issuer (ft Hayek)
Major institutions (companies, universities, cities, influencers) issue their own currency backed by reputation, perceived value.

No central authority, no monetary policy
No central bank. No macro policy. No monopoly. No managed inflation or deflation. Each currency fluctuates with trust in its issuer.
Lose credibility, your currency crashes like a stock.

Salaries and transactions = constant arbitrage
You’re paid in a mix of currencies: 40% StanfordCoin, 30% AppleDollar, 20% TeslaCredits, 10% SelfCoin.

People constantly decide:

• Which currency to hold?

• Which to convert?

• Which to trade?

You need to be an economist, trader, and strategist just to buy groceries.
Value becomes liquid, contextual, dynamic.

Money = reputation + power + network signal
Strong currencies are issued by dominant entities.
The coin of a famous entrepreneur holds value, not from assets, but aura, influence and network. Money becomes symbolic capital. A signaling tool. A calling card.

Systemic risk
The system is hyper-fragile:

• Trust breakdowns = instant currency collapse

• Local chain-reaction crises

• No coordination in a global shock

• No risk mutualization. No lender of last resort

It’s Darwinian: every coin lives or dies alone.

Conclusion

The economic system of The Unincorporated Man is: Deregulated Silicon Valley capitalism + equity markets + human biography.
A world where the market didn’t just dominate society, it replaced it.

“The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, because it was properly done.” - Balzac

Balzac saw clearly what others refuse to admit.

But there are nuances…

I made my first millions in the mid-2010s selling PDF files online. Not through Amazon, where ebooks race to $0.99 and every seller is forced into submission as a "price taker." Instead, I charged from $27 to $297 per PDF directly on my own ugly, uncelebrated websites—using direct response marketing (DRM) that returned 7 times every dollar invested, and compounding my earnings by relentlessly reinvesting every cent back into growth, year after year.

There was zero glamour, zero social validation. It was raw, ruthless profit. Outsiders looked on, perplexed. Suspicion was their natural response. How could wealth come so easily from something so mundane, so opaque?

Yet ambiguity is precisely where serious money begin. Big money thrives in uncharted territories: in blurred legality, silent markets, and audacity without permission.

Crucially, it thrives in niches with minimal human capital, minimal competition, and minimal mimetic desire—places others instinctively avoid or ignore, leaving you alone to extract pure asymmetric profit."

This essay is about embracing that ambiguity, weaponizing antisocial focus, and making your first million without apologies, TED Talks, or startup storytelling.

Why Suspicious Wealth Thrives in Ambiguity

Real wealth rarely emerges from polished boardrooms or transparent, regulated marketplaces. The big scores happen in what I call la “phase sauvage” —the wild, blurry spaces untouched by consensus, legality, or moral clarity. This ambiguity is the natural habitat of outsized profits.

Former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky understood this clearly. In the chaotic openness of Gorbachev’s 1987 glasnost and perestroika, he built an empire from nothing—while others waited timidly for permission. Similarly, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) saw crypto’s long-term potential when Bitcoin was still a fringe curiosity, condemned by mainstream finance as a scam or passing fad.

Both men profited not merely from risk-taking, but from heretical foresight: the courage to believe in something that was socially unacceptable yet inevitably true.

If your wealth doesn't provoke suspicion, it's probably too conformist, too mimetic, too late. Ambiguity isn’t a flaw—it’s a competitive advantage.

Defining Autistic Antisocial Money

Autism, as a concept here, isn't a playful metaphor—it's an operational framework. It means cultivating an obsessive, almost pathological fixation on niches and opportunities the mainstream dismisses outright. It's about placing attention not just where others refuse to look, but where others actively avoid looking because it feels irrelevant, trivial, or even ridiculous. This kind of extreme, autistic-like focus is neither admired nor understood socially, but it's precisely why it works: no mimetic desire, no competition.

Antisociality complements this obsessive attention perfectly. Being antisocial doesn't mean mere introversion or social awkwardness—it's a deliberate, methodical rejection of the crowd's tastes, preferences, and beliefs. René Girard made this explicit: extraversion, empathy, and imitation drive human desire, pushing entire markets toward ruthless efficiency. In hyper-efficient markets, profits vanish because all opportunities become obvious, over-exploited, and competitively priced.

This is precisely the business inefficiency of extraversion: if everyone desires what everyone else desires, profit evaporates.

What you need instead is weaponized autism: a cold, socially indifferent obsession with unearthing overlooked truths. Facebook early investor Peter Thiel crystallized this insight clearly: real wealth emerges not from chasing popular mysteries or accepted conventions, but from recognizing ignored truths (“secrets”) that mainstream consensus refuses to acknowledge.

In practice, this demands the courage—and strategic discipline—to deliberately ignore social validation. Forget applause, admiration, prestige, or acceptance. Pursue instead the ruthless clarity of first principles. Think clearly, act without concern for mimetic approval, and wealth inevitably follows.

Macro vs. Micro Opportunities

Money emerges from asymmetries—gaps between what you understand and what everyone else believes. These gaps can appear on two distinct scales: macro and micro.

At the macro level, fortunes arise from contrarian worldviews (“Weltanschauung”). Consider scenarios that seem outrageous today but will feel inevitable tomorrow. Is our future Varoufakis’s techno-feudalism, where digital platforms enslave both data and labor? Or perhaps AI-driven communism, a hyper-efficient Gosplan managed by algorithms rather than bureaucrats? Maybe turbo-capitalism accelerates, leaving behind an irredeemable chasm between capital holders and everyone else. These scenarios are not mere thought experiments. They are roadmaps of tomorrow’s asymmetric wealth creation—heretical today, obvious in hindsight.

At the micro level, opportunities come from meticulous obsession with overlooked niches. Think dropshipping circa 2014: perceived as trivial, aesthetically repulsive, socially shameful, yet wildly profitable. Early adopters quietly made millions, precisely because the niche appeared beneath notice, beneath contempt.

Macro or micro—the strategy remains the same: identify asymmetries, reject consensus, and monetize what others refuse to see.

Core Antisocial Principles

Autistic antisocial money requires rigorous, systematic rejection: trends, consensus, aesthetics, morality, monopoly, transparency, mediocrity—and noise.

• Reject trends. Trends are mimetic desire crystallized, crowded markets drained of profit. Wealth lies in secrets, never conventions.

• Reject consensus. Assume mainstream opinions false until brutally proven true. Methodological flat-earthism clarifies hidden truths.

• Reject aesthetic norms. Ugly converts better. Remember the hideous early-internet pages printing millions—proof that beauty signals conformity, not profit.

• Reject false morality. Human vice is eternal, socially condemned, and extraordinarily profitable. French tech billionaire Xavier Niel’s fortune began in the sleazy shadows of “Minitel Rose,” a French proto-internet sex chat. Pump.fun, today's memecoin gambling platform, follows the same antisocial recipe—no apologies, pure profit.

• Reject bourgeois monopolies. Symbolic violence, artificial scarcity, elite preservation—monopolies suffocate innovation. Uber slaughtered the taxi industry’s rent-seeking comfort with ruthless, antisocial disruption.

• Reject transparency. Transparency attracts imitation, noise, competition. Strategic deception protects your margins. Koch Industries, the largest private company in America ($125 billion annual revenue), deliberately avoids public markets to keep strategic operations hidden and to escape regulatory disclosure.

• Reject mediocrity. Follow Taleb’s barbell: embrace extremes, destroy safety. Mediocrity ensures zero wealth—antisocial money demands extremes.

• Reject noise. Information matters only when it reduces uncertainty (Shannon, 1948). Profits hide in signals drowned by market noise. Autistic antisociality isolates pure signal from irrelevant distraction, extracting actionable truth from worthless chatter.

Each rejection pushes you further from mainstream approval and closer to authentic, suspiciously profitable wealth.

Operational Guidelines ("Dîner de Cons" Method)

In Francis Veber’s satirical masterpiece, Le Dîner de Cons, Parisian elites compete each week to invite the most spectacularly idiotic guest to dinner. The hidden cruelty? The idiot believes he's invited for his expertise—absurdly narrow obsessions like matchstick-model-building or boomerang throwing. Laughable. Ridiculous. Utterly autistic.

Yet, in our antisocial model, this idiot is precisely the one who wins.

His superhuman fixation on an obscure niche—a niche the mimetic majority finds irrelevant or humiliating—creates the perfect profit asymmetry. While the crowd mocks and dismisses, the autistic antisocial entrepreneur quietly monopolizes an overlooked, low-competition market.

Operationally, adopt a ruthless filtering process:

100 → 10 → 1.

Identify 100 niches, trends, or products initially dismissed as absurd or trivial.

Drill deep into 10 of them. Know everything: traffic sources, funnels, suppliers, copywriting angles, SEO intricacies, customer psychology. Become insufferable in your fixation, until people pity you.

Finally, choose just one opportunity. Execute brutally—blitzkrieg-style iteration, like Rocket Internet’s hyper-aggressive global launches (back in the days … they are more relaxed now).

Your first milestone is neither scale, nor press, nor validation—it’s the first dollar earned. From zero to one. Revenue is the purest signal, the unmistakable proof hidden in the market’s deafening noise. Without revenue, you have only speculation, vanity, delusion. With revenue, you hold tangible proof: concrete evidence of a profitable asymmetry that others have (maybe) failed to detect.

This autistic obsession, executed antisocially, is your strategic superpower—because no mimetic competitor will ever suspect that the "idiot" has already won.

Stealth, Security, and Legal Caution

Your wealth will draw suspicion—that’s the entire point. Suspicion repels imitators; transparency attracts them. The ambiguity surrounding your wealth will discourage mimetic competition. Suspicion shields your profits; openness invites crickets. Crickets are low-IQ, opportunistic copycats flooding profitable niches with noise, scams, and competition. You must protect your asymmetric advantage at all costs.

• First principle: Strategically hide your success. Never brag. Never share revenue screenshots. Never build in public. Validation feeds vanity, vanity breeds vulnerability. Silence is leverage. Discretion is survival.

• Second principle: Differentiate clearly between social taboos and legal boundaries. Black Swan author, Nassim N. Taleb is blunt: avoid jail, avoid death. While antisocial money thrives in moral ambiguity, legal ambiguity can ruin your life. Exploit societal hypocrisy relentlessly, but respect the bright red lines of legality.

• Third principle: Strategic deception is legitimate protection. Google vehemently denies its monopolistic dominance even as it tightens its chokehold. Adopt a similar logic: conceal your true leverage. Disguise your asymmetric advantages behind layers of plausible deniability.

Stealth isn’t paranoia; it’s pragmatic. Privacy isn’t cowardice; it’s cunning. Antisocial money demands strategic invisibility.

For the past forty years, the bottom 90% have been systematically gutted by a machine called “tech.” Automation eliminated jobs, globalization outsourced them, Uberization atomized them, and finance devoured what was left. Technology — once a promise — became the architecture of dispossession. In the United States, the top 10% now control 67% of total wealth; the top 1% alone hold 34.7%. The bottom half of the population owns just 2.6%, and 36% of Americans have less than $100 in savings — a society one missed paycheck away from collapse. Warren Buffett said it without irony: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Scott Galloway notes the punchline: the fastest-growing demographic in America is billionaires — 500 of them in 2013, 2,500 now.

This isn’t a bug. It’s the system working exactly as designed. Which is why it’s time to stop moralizing and start thinking like Karl Marx — not the cartoonish communist, but the brutal analyst of systems. Marx is not much about revolution; he’s about understanding how value is created, how it’s extracted, and how ideology is built to conceal it. Infrastructure shapes superstructure. The economy sculpts culture.

Winners of the Past Four Decades

The winners :

• Wall Street: Bankers, hedge fund managers, private equity professionals, and traders who have thrived in a deregulated financial ecosystem, vividly portrayed since Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" (1987).

• Silicon Valley: Early-stage employees, developers, and executives of GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), startups, and gig-economy platforms like Uber. The superficial prosperity—symbolized by luxurious penthouses and expensive coffees—is starkly contrasted by the precarious employment conditions beneath.

• Top Corporate Management & Consultants: C-suite executives and high-end consultants benefitting from corporate governance and strategic advice monopolies.

• Regulated Professions: Doctors, lawyers, educators protected by institutional barriers, certifications, and regulatory complexity, securing their economic positions.

• Online Entrepreneurs & Builders (since 2010): A new generation of online entrepreneurs and digital builders leveraged platforms like Stripe, Shopify, and Facebook Ads to rapidly scale profitable ventures. These digital-first entrepreneurs thrived by creating cash-flow-positive businesses, harnessing accessible digital tools to swiftly generate and compound wealth.

Marx Revisited – Polarization and its Temporary Mitigations

What we’re living through isn’t new — it’s the reappearance of Marx’s central thesis.

Marx was writing during the early rise of a fragile middle class — office clerks, civil servants, engineers, modest professionals — precariously positioned between capital and labor. These were the first mass consumers, frequenting places like Le Bon Marché in Paris, founded in 1852, the world’s first modern department store. Zola captured this shift in Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), where shopping became spectacle and desire was industrialized. Marx saw this class not as a stabilizer but as a buffer — easily seduced, easily crushed, and ultimately disposable.

Despite the rise of a middle class, Marx believed it would eventually dissolve under capitalism’s pressures, with most being pushed downward into the proletariat and a tiny minority consolidating into the bourgeoisie.

What remains is a raw binary: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production (now digital, financial, and algorithmic), and the proletariat, who sell their labor into increasingly precarious, commoditized, and surveilled markets.

Marx called it the “industrial reserve army” — a permanently unemployed or underemployed class that keeps wages low and workers obedient. Capitalism requires this pressure, but it also contains a fatal contradiction: by suppressing wages and hollowing out demand, it undermines its own future.

Historically, we postponed the inevitable collapse with targeted injections of socialism — the 1884 Waldeck-Rousseau law legalizing unions in France, the 1886 American Federation of Labor, the New Deal from FD Roosevelt, welfare states, social security in post WWII Britain. These weren’t moral concessions; they were pressure valves and demand for the industry.

But by the late 20th century, neoliberalism replaced class warfare with debt warfare. Governments were convinced to borrow in order to fund welfare and avoid riots, while citizens themselves took on debt to maintain middle-class consumption habits. The result is grotesque: a system that subsidizes its own decay, while demanding austerity in the name of fiscal responsibility. It’s not sustainable — it’s anesthetic before amputation.

The Current War Against the Top 9%

The top 9% thought they were safe. Earning $100k to $500k a year, with degrees, stock options, and gym memberships, they mistook proximity for power. They saw themselves as part of the elite, aligned with billionaires like Bernard Arnault — when in truth, they were just his consumers and his middle managers.

They didn’t own the system. They operated it. They fought in the class war, but not on their own behalf: they were foot soldiers deployed against the 90%, enforcing austerity, optimizing productivity, parroting meritocracy. But now the beast is turning on them too.

Musk fired 80% of Twitter’s staff and the company didn’t implode — it became profitable. That wasn’t a glitch. It was a demonstration. Investors took notes. Google employs 180,000 people with a median salary of $331,894. What happens when shareholders demand the same bloodletting? The logic is simple: the cost must come down, and the algorithm doesn’t care if you have a Stanford degree.

20th century demographer Alfred Sauvy called it the “déversement” — technological spillover from skilled to unskilled labor. But this time, the spill doesn’t go to humans. It goes to machines. In May 2025, TechCrunch reported that a quarter of Y Combinator startups had codebases almost entirely generated by AI. The new elite is not human. It’s a neural net. And it doesn’t ask for health insurance.

The Ripple Effect and Negative Trickle Down

The top 1% have exited the real economy. They don’t consume like the rest — they accumulate. Keynes called it the declining marginal propensity to consume: the richer you are, the less of your income you spend. At that level, money doesn’t circulate. It compounds.

And while the state pretends to govern them, they’ve already escaped the fiscal contract. They don’t pay taxes; they pay advisors. It’s the bottom 99% who will absorb the cost — through inflation, currency debasement, and the slow erosion of purchasing power.

The rich don’t fear democracy because it’s noble. They fear it because it works — and when it works, people vote to redistribute. Which is why the elite's true project is not profit, but insulation. But here’s the fatal flaw: by hoarding capital and crushing the middle class, they’re destroying their own customer base. Who buys the Louis Vuitton bags, the overpriced Paris apartments, the art, the Cartier watches, the illusion of luxury? If everyone else is broke or fired, the party ends. This is where Marx bites again — not as ideology, but as diagnosis. Capitalism, left to itself, will strangle its own demand. The engine keeps producing, but the passengers are dead. This isn’t trickle-down economics. It’s evaporation.

The Mirage of Innovation and the Anatomy of a Real Paradigm Shift

Economist Carlota Perez in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital teaches us that capitalism doesn’t evolve gently — it mutates through violent, systemic shocks. Each technological revolution — from steam to silicon — follows the same arc: a burst of speculative frenzy as financial capital floods into a new technology, rising inequality and social tension as institutions lag behind, a crash that exposes the system’s rot, and, if society adapts, a deployment phase where productive capital builds something real.

But that transition depends entirely on the surrounding institutions. If they adapt and include, the result is a golden age. If they ossify or extract, the result is collapse masked as growth. After World War II, mass production met the welfare state — and the American middle class was born. After 2008, the internet met financialization — and the result was Amazonian empire and gig economy precarity. Nobel Prize Winners Acemoglu and Robinson (Why Nations Fail) made the line clear: inclusive institutions distribute power and compound prosperity; extractive ones centralize wealth and rot from within.

Web3 promised to be the next paradigm — a decentralized system of value creation, distribution, and ownership. The theory was elegant: protocols instead of platforms, code instead of CEOs, users as stakeholders. But so far, reality looks more like Pump.fun — a $600 million drain of liquidity from degenerate gamblers chasing meme coins. A new frontier, yes — but maybe one already colonized.

And yet, something endures beneath the casino: Bitcoin. Unyielding, permissionless, sovereign. If this is the turning point Perez predicted, and the empire of fiat is entering its terminal phase, Bitcoin isn’t just a hedge — it’s the ark.

From Zeitgeist to Weltanschauung: The Shift from Mimetism to Conviction

Here’s the only real (non marxist) advice left: make money, stack Bitcoin. Everything else is noise or cope. In a collapsing paradigm, capital is both shield and weapon. The question is how you generate it — and there are only two viable modes.

The first is Zeitgeist: ride the mimetic wave, imitate what works now, surf virality like a parasite with no spine. It’s fast, cynical, and often effective. Play the game, sell the dopamine, print the merch.

The second path is harder, but infinitely more powerful: Weltanschauung — build from conviction. Hold a worldview so sharp it cuts through consensus. Ask Peter Thiel’s heretical question: “What important truth do you believe that very few people agree with you on?” That’s where the alpha lives — not in following trends, but in anticipating reversals.

One path exploits the crowd. The other outsmarts it. Choose. But in both cases, the endgame is the same: exit the system, preserve optionality, accumulate non-state collateral. In short: make fiat, escape fiat.