The James Altucher Show

Alex Berenson had the dream job. But he was unhappy. And perhaps it even scarred him in some ways. He switched it up. To his true dreams. To the dreams he had for himself since he was a child. I want to do this. First off, Alex has written 11 bestselling thriller novels. Alex knows how to get the reader to turn the page and ask, "What happens next?!" This is an unbelievably hard skill. But it's not the most important skill when you are moving into your dream job. I will tell you the most important skill. And Alex explains more clearly how he did it when we are in the podcast. The most important skill is to have this weird sort of "active arrogance". Here's the gap: The best in your profession have skills, experience, and they know how to sit down and DO something every day. The beginners: they WANT to do something. They PLAN to do something. They SAY they will eventually do it. They THINK they have the skills they need. But they never do it. The ones who succeeed. They have the arrogance to think they can just simply sit down and do it. .Despite not having the skills. Despite being total amataurs. They simply sit down and DO IT. By doing it, you LEARN the skills, you DO the job [a first novel in Alex's case], and you get better. DOING is the only way to succeed. Most poeple stop before this point. Alex didn't. And thank god. Because his 11 bestsellers have been lifesavers for me. A way for me to dream. A way for me to escape. Here's how Alex did it: [6:25] - Create your own universe "In 2003 and 2004, I went to Iraq for the paper," he said (he worked at The New York Times). "The war had ended, supposedly... we deposed Saddam. Most reporters go during the 'active phase,' so The Times said any cub reporter could put their hand up and go. So I put my hand up." Then he came back and realized he had stories. And John Wells was born. Alex has written 11 bestsellers. All page-turners. I wanted to know what made him start writing thrillers. I've always thought of writing fiction. I still wonder if that's what's next. Here's what he told me, "In my universe, nobody lies to me. They can lie to each other, they can even lie to themselves, they cannot lie to me." [11:00] - Some luck goes unnoticed "Coming back to the states was a shock," he said. "The wastefulness of this country really smacks you when you've been away for a while, certainly in a place like that." "What do you mean? What's an example?" "I think the example that struck me is the electrical grid." We take it for granted that the lights go on. And then use them like crazy. I live in NY. The lights are always on. It doesn't matter what time. And I never think about it. "American is a place of abundance," Alex said. "I guess that's a good thing. It's better to be rich than poor but realize that 80% of the world is never going to live in conditions anything like this. It really does just smack you in the face to realize how lucky we are and how little we realize that." [12:00] - Choose yourself I asked Alex if he thinks we're becoming complacent as a society. "Thats a real fear," Alex said. There are two sides. One side is if you give people everything will they stop wanting to work? Will they say they have enough. And give up. But then the other side is you work so hard and go nowhere. "The flip side of that is if you make the system so unfair that nobody believes hard work can get you ahead, they're not going to work either." And I think that's why work should be more than a paycheck. There has to be a vision. And following that vision is how you choose yourself. [15:00] - Have a little arrogance Alex said a lot of reporters want to write novels. He was one of them. But there's something that separates those who write from those who don't... "I did something arrogant," he said. "I wrote a novel." So I wondered if that's... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan Holiday, stop writing books that are just for me! With "Perennial Seller" you just answered an obsessive question I've had for years: What makes something, someone, some product, some art, withstand the test of time? What is the magic sauce? The secret formula? What makes something sell a million copies a year (music, art, books, products, etc)... forever? I want to know. I'll try my best to summarize our conversation and your book but people should buy the book for your 1000s of examples: BE COUNTERINTUITIVE If you write what everyone else is already thinking, then nobody needs to read your work, or use your product. They already have it. It doesn't matter if you are 50% better than anyone else. Nobody understands how to judge that except the experts in your field. And those experts don't care about you. They might even hate you. Create your own field. And be 1000% the best in that field. DON'T TRY TO COMPETE The 100th person who writes a "50 Shades of Grey" style book, or a disco pop EMD album can...MAYBE...get 1% of the audience. If you find an underserved audience, you can get 100% of it. There's an important side effect of this: IF YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING FOR THE MONEY...YOU LOSE. Because the rest of the world is competing for that dollar. Money is a side effect of creativity, quality art, creating something unique, and building your marketing into that art. VALIDATE THE IDEA Test out sample chapters. Release songs on YouTube. Keep iterating. Keep digging for your authentic voice. In comedy, it took Louis CK 20 years of telling jokes before he found his voice when talking about dating and parenting. Don't look for LOTs of fans at first. Look for the hard-core fans. The ones who will stick with you while you go on this crazy ride. The ones who will share. What my prior podcast guest, Kevin Kelly, calls "The One Thousand True Fans". DON'T GIVE UP IF YOU DON'T WIN ON DAY ONE Ryan told me that "Smokey and the Bandit" beat "Star Wars" at the box office the same weekend they both opened. I did not know that! It almost seems like blasphemy to me. John Grisham only sold a few thousand copies when he first published "A Time To Kill". Only much later did it sell millions. Catcher in the Rye had a slow start. Now sells a million copies a year. The best works of art and the best products have to fight the masses to find their right audience. But when they do, the audience will reward them. Write or create what is unique to you, find the 1000 true fans. The ones who are hard-core and love the value you bring. And serve that market over and over. That divides the winners from the non-winners. TELL A STORY THAT IS PERSONAL TO YOU "Choose Yourself" could have been another ranty personal development business book ("Blah!"). Instead I wove in a personal story of struggle and loss and pain. Pain that changed me and still does every single day to (hopefully) lesser extent. This is what makes a story both unique (it's my story) and universal (everyone experiences pain, everyone wants to solve it). Too many people play a persona ("my life is perfect so let me teach it to you") and that's inauthentic. TELL A STORY THAT RESONATES WITH EVERYONE Star Wars is a perfect example. It's the 'arc of the hero'. A boy who struggles, encounters problems, faces them, lives forever. I.e. Jesus. Krishna. Buddha. Star Wars is a sci-fi western (great example of "idea sex") where he innovated on the graphics but used a story that was basically "Focus grouped" for thousands of years. Thousands! So he stuck within the rules of a genre (actually several that he combined) but also made it uniquely his own. This is the key to successful art. Telling a story that is personal to you AND resonates with everyone is very difficult. It takes practice. It takes marketing. It takes listening. That's why these are the items that become perennial sellers. It's worth... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Scot Cohen is the best networker on the planet. I have never seen anything like it. And he used that skill to make tens of millions of dollars, not only for himself but for many others. I wanted him to explain, in detail, how. But first: I'm sorry, Scot. I am really, truly sorry. I am horrified at my behavior. A year of bad behavior. Imagine: you owe someone a phone call and you say to yourself, "Ok, I'll call tomorrow". And then tomorrow you say, "Well, maybe tomorrow". And then you delayed so much you feel awkward about calling. Because you know you have to apologize and you hate confrontation. Stupid, right? Let's make this even worse: the person you have to call back has been incredibly generous to you. In fact, he let you stay in his apartment for three months for free. You've worked together for 14 years and he's one of the most successful investors in NYC. And then you did this for no reason. I'm an idiot. --- The day I threw out all of my belongings and gave up my apartment I was sitting in a restaurant with my one bag and I called Scot Cohen. I said, "I'm just sitting in this restaurant." "Where are you going to live?" "I have no idea yet." I coudl've just stayed in a hotel. But for various reasons I was feeling a bit down. I just wanted to sit in the restaurant. I had no idea where I would live. "Come on over," Scot said. "Stay here." And so I did. For the next three months I stayed in one of Scot's several apartments. I invested in Scot's hedge fund in 2003. We've worked together on and off for 14 years. He's one of the most successful hedge fund managers I know. He's made tens of millions, invested in dozens of companies that went up 1000s of percent, and I am glad that, in my own small way, I was able to help him in several situations. . When you build your network over years, over decades, and your network is made up of good people, they help you out. They let you move in their apartment. You work on deals together to make money. You meet each others girlfriends who become wives. And then sometimes you let them down and you have to apologize. So I did. On the podcast. This is how stupid and awkward I am: I hadn't seen Scot in a year. I had stupidly avoided his calls. And so I said, "come on to the podcast and that's where I will apologize". And then, I said, step by step we will break down and figure out 1. HOW YOU BECAME THE BEST NETWORKER I HAVE EVER SEEN 2. HOW YOU USED THAT SKILL TO MAKE TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS Scot came to NYC with nothing. But he had a skill that is worth tens of millions at the highest level. It's networking at a level I've never seen before or since. ----- One time, a year earlier, I was sitting in his apartment. Scot rushed in, changed into a suit and rushed out. It was Sunday night, 8 o'clock at night. He was rushing from tennis with one hedge fund manager to the wedding of one of his investors. That's how he made himself so successful. He networks seven days a week. I just sit around and fall asleep early. I asked him on the podcast how he did it. How can I do it? How can anyone do it? We broke down his story: 1. Self awareness "Do self-work," he said. "Really try to dial in on who you are and where you want to go, because if you don't have that right, you're never going to be able to get off first base. "This is fundamental. It takes a while. You've got to have patience to play this out, so give yourself the time. You're not going to get a quick fix. Nothing's going to happen in three months, or a year. It's going to take years. So get that fundamental work done on yourself first, and then you can start growing." 2. Keep a diary Scot told me to write down where you want to go. "If you don't write stuff down, how are you going to go anywhere? You're not going to remember where you came from." "I think it's really important... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

She was my partner in crime. Farnoosh recently hosted her own show on CNBC. She also has a super popular podcast. And she's a successful book author and all around writer. But to me she's more than that. From 2006 to 2008 we did videos together every day. We would meet on Wall Street, a video guy would tape us talking about whatever we wanted to talk about, and then we'd send that video out onto the interwebs. The day the first iphone came out we went to the Apple flagship store near Central Park. We interviewed the people who were waiting on line all night. A homeless guy started to pick on Farnoosh. Not that I am so brave but I didn't want to seem unmanly so I stood in between the man and Farnoosh and asked him to please go away. He lifted me up and threw me to the ground. And then he went away. That was a fun story that I wanted to share. But more...Farnoosh is a textbook example of how a career can be made and be a success. She had a fulltime job learning skills she loved and then mastered: financial markets, writing, video, multimedia, communication, and the business of business. While at the full time job, she wrote a book on the markets: YOU'RE SO MONEY. From that, she no longer needed thestreet.com and diversified her sources of income by writing for many outlets, going on various TV shows, starting her own show, writing more, starting a successful and profitable podcast, and many other activities. And ten years later, we still find each other doing videos together or podcasts, or articles, or whatever. Building a career is like knitting a tapestry. It's small thread by small thread. It takes years. It becomes beautiful. And it's something you can fall into when it's done for comfort and security. That tapestry becomes your network. A career is not what you created today, but the networks you built up today that will create unexpected opportunities for you ten, fifteen, twenty years later. As an example: I just did a deal with a friend of mine I began working with twenty years ago. Every day I see these opportunities. And I'm horrible at networking. Farnoosh isn't. But there's another reason I wanted Farnoosh on my podcast. Farnoosh is great at interviewing. And I wanted her to interview me. I find when I am a guest on other people's podcasts I always find new ways to say the things I want to express, new ways to say what I've learned from my guests and my experiences. Who better to interview me than the person who has been interviewing me for almost a dozen years. "I came prepared," she told me. Because she wanted to find out what you don't see on Google... Here's what we talked about: The rise of entrepreneurship and the rise of "gurus." Farnoosh asked me, "Who should people trust?" But really, it doesn't matter. Anytime you "study" entrepreneurship, it means you're not DOING entrepreneurship. It's great to have ideas. And it's fine to read one business books (TOPS), but then that's it. Get in the mud and starting doing. - listen at 7 minutes Farnoosh asked me, "Do you remember the first time you used the internet?" It was before the web. I logged into a news group and could talk to people from Norway about Star Wars. Besides the phone, it was the first time I spoke to someone without being in the same room... It was 1986. And then the web started. Hypertext came in. And I thought it would be used for storytelling. But then it became huge for commerce. Then she asked me, "What's next?" - listen at 19 minutes Mentorship and finding your inner circle - listen at 25 minutes Evolution, willpower and the access economy - listen at 36 minutes My daily schedule (the morning is my "maker" hours, in the evening I manage several businesses and at night I have fun. I do comedy.) - listen at 38 minutes Is it better to focus on one thing and enjoy the subtleties of what it takes to be the best in the world at something? Or diversify?... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"Have a spirit of adventure, the desire to learn something new, be an explorer and never get too comfortable." ------- "Imagine this room is filling up with poisonous gas," Tim said. He's looking straight at me. "There's two doors behind me, one window and one to either side." He points exactly where everything is, even though he's still looking straight at me. "We have several choices," he said, "I can pick the locks of one of the doors. I can break down the doors. I can smash one of the windows and we can climb out. We have three minutes until we die. What do we do?" Tim is aware of everything around him. Which is probably why I started off the podcast with: "We have nothing in common." "We're 30 seconds into the interview and we're already disagreeing," he said. It's a creative challenge to figure out how to relate with each person I meet... He's a US Army Special Forces sniper. He's been to Iraq and Afghanistan. He's an MMA fighter. And has multiple black belts. I have zero black belts. I have negative black belts. I haven't been to war. And I'm not trained to kill people. I can't shove someone without looking funny. So we have different instincts. "I remember every moment of every gunfight I've ever been in," he said. "And there are things that wake me up at night." "Like what?" "In the movies, saving your friends and killing a bad guy is a high-five moment, right? No. You just took a human life. That is something that echoes with you through eternity." He told me about the decisions he had to make every day. And how his dad's words rang in the back of his head, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." There were four people in Tim's unit. Each had a different job: communications, medicine, explosives, tactics. Tim was tactics. "Weapons tactic expert," that was his job title. He constantly had to assess whether or not to fire. Because the situation was never clear. Innocent people could be in the same room as the man with the machine gun. "He was shooting at my teammates. He had a machine gun in the window." And Tim didn't know what (or who else) was on the other side... Then he asked me, "Do you throw the grenade?" I didn't know. My instinct is to run. "Run? The bullets are 175 grain and travel at 2,800 feet per second. Do you run 2,800 feet per second?" He threw the grenade. "Did you ever find out what was behind that window?" "Yeah... the moment the grenade goes off and all you hear are women and children screaming and crying. I stayed up for a week with the women and kids that were in that room. We fight until the fight is over. But then we revisit and give them the best medical care that we can in the field and transport them to the best hospitals that we have access to. That's the most beautiful thing about US Army Special Forces, 'The Green Berets.' We want to do everything by, with and through the indigenous people." I can't imagine. And not being able to imagine, is what we have in common. It's when you try to find the bridge where two people can meet that I learn the most about the people around me. Here's what we talked about... Shortcuts: - [12:20] - We talked about his childhood. I wanted to know if fighting is inherent. He says it wasn't. Although, he did learn how to fight when he was young. His brother and friends always threw him in the pool. "Were you traumatized?" I asked. Tim had the mindset that he could get stronger. And he planned to throw them in the pool someday. All 9 of them. But in between sports and horsing around, Tim's Mom brought in balance. She enrolled him in piano lessons. I didn't ask if he still plays piano. I don't know if he still has this balance. But it's worthwhile to try to create it in your own life. To lose your stresses in the concentration of a new art, a new practice. [27:12] - "War is horrible. Period. It's where we see the most unimaginable... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In my podcast Charlie and I talked half the time about getting past anxiety. And half the time about this: [14:00] - Charlie's time working for Tim Ferriss, doing a virtual internship with Seth Godin, and marketing Ramit Sethi's New York Times bestseller. He told me how he pitched his heroes (and how he suggests you can too) [23:00] - We talked about getting paid to do what you love (and how the first step usually means doing what you love for free). If you want a job you love, it (usually) has to start free. That's how you build the skill. People in low-level jobs are essentially paid to move away from their dreams. It's up to you to move toward your dreams. Charlie said, "You're brought into school where your spontaneity and impulses are muted. You're forced to work on stuff that is not that interesting to you... I think that's why it is so important to work for free because you have to tap back into what matters to you." [52:00] - Then we began talking about anxiety. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You have five minutes to kill. That's it. Those five minutes can make or break a career. I don't think I would be able to handle the pressure. I've done a lot of public speaking. And now I've tried standup. For the past three months I've been going up once or twice a week. It's difficult. I thought 20 years of public speaking would help me. It doesn't. It's the Hunger Games on that stage. So Fred Stoller is my hero. He was a standup comic 30 years ago, then he was a writer on Seinfeld, then he's been a guest start on 60+ TV shows including Seinfeld, Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, Scrubs, and every other show I can think of. He's sitcom history. And he wrote all about it in three excellent books, including his latest, "Five Minutes to Kill", about his five minutes on the 1989 HBO Young Comedians Special and what happened to the specific performers of that show. So I asked, "If everybody thinks you're so funny, then why didn't you have your own show?" But I wasn't the first person to ask Fred this... He asked himself the same question throughout his career. So did his mom. And it hurt his self-esteem. He said, "When I used to headline as a comedian, I'd feel sorry for the people lining up waiting to see me... like I was their weekend." Now he's entering a new world. He's writing. And learning how to embrace "this weird guy that I am... who got lost finding this place." He's learning how to express himself with his own voice. He reinvented from standup to writing on the best sitcom ever. Then he reinvented again to appear on all the TV shows he's been on. Now he's 59, and he's reinventing again. He's a writer. His books are excellent. Reinvention is not something special people do. It's not something for only a few. Fred has been frustrated and also exhilarated down every path he's chosen. Reinvention IS the goal. Not a pathway to it. Reinvention is a habit. It's what we do every day to bring out the fire inside that constantly wants to express itself. That's why I wanted to speak to Fred. Not because he wrote "The Soup" episode of Seinfeld. But because he's still doing what he loves to do. And what he loves to do is constantly changing. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I was afraid before interviewing Jocko. I think it was instinctual. His body is seven times the size of mine. I pointed at the cover of his new book, "The Way of The Warrior Kid. "See this kid," I said. "That's me right now." I like to overlap somewhere with my guest. Like a story we both can share and laugh about. With Jim Norton, for instance, we grew up together. With Garry Kasparov we were both chess players. And I also worked on Deep Blue for a while, the computer that would ultimately defeat him. But with Jocko...what? I felt intimidated. He was like this superhero that had conquered the world and everyone respected him and I felt like the nerdy little boy I was in junior high school. So I started talking. "I can't do a pull up. And I've never been in the battlefield... obviously. Or I would look completely different. You were the commander of your SEAL unit and you had to make life and death decisions. But out of that, you cultivated all of these leadership lessons." He listened. That was nice. Then I asked why he joined the military. (And stayed for 20 years.) But he flipped the question back to me. (He has a podcast, too. So he knows how to drive an interview.) "Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be in combat," he said. "Why?" "Well... what did you want to do when you were growing up?" he asked. "I guess I wanted to write and interview people." "Well, there you go." I don't think my brain fully realizes that I'm doing what I dreamt of doing as a kid. Jocko made it sound so simple. "Well, there you go." We're not all lucky with everything we do. Jocko is lucky. I am lucky. But some of his friends didn't make it back from war. Doing is the step forward. But sometimes it worthwhile to just pause... long enough to hear the words. "Well, there you go." We began the interview... ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jim Norton is the reason why I do podcasts. First, he's a world-famous comedian, recently released a one hour special on Netflix, has been on shows like "Louie" and "Inside Amy Schumer" has written two New York Times bestselling books and has appeared on countless radio shows and podcasts. But just as interesting to me...we grew up together. The first day Jim moved into town we were in fourth grade. Rather than keeping his mouth shut like anyone else just moving into town he immediately started making everyone laugh. Day one we were laughing so hard I thought my stomach was going to break. We all said out loud that day (Jim doesn't remember but I do), "you should be a comedian". And he did. He did! I like when my podcast combines the personal and the professional. Combines my own story with the story of someone achieving peak performance in an area of life that I love. Comedy is not just about making people laugh. And being a standup comedian is not just about "standing up" in front of a crowd of people and telling jokes. Comedy is about observing the hidden truths in life that everyone knows but nobody has ever quite articulated. And standup is about how to articulate that truth in such a way that people feel momentarily unsafe and confused (the setup), and relieved (the punchline). But that's only one theory of comedy. There are many. And so I wanted to try it for myself. I've been doing it now a few times a week for two months. It's hard! It's the most difficult thing I've ever tried to get good at. So I asked Jim, who has been doing it all of his life, to come on the podcast. Here are some things I learned: Make Mistakes - listen at [8:08] I told Jim I was afraid to bomb. To tell a joke and have nobody laugh. "Bombing is what we learn from the most," Jim said. "It's not about how to avoid bombing. You will fall flat all the time. It's about getting up after that." "I left myself no safety net," he said. "I started when I was 21. I didn't have a diploma. I got a GED three years after I got sober. I have no high school diploma... So I knew it was going to be this or nothing." Sometimes to survive the biggest pains on the way up, you have to fly without a safety net. You have to fall. The way to hit the top tier in any area of life is to figure out where the line is, and go beyond that line. If you aren't failing, then you aren't trying to be unique. You aren't going to be the top tier. Find Time to Laugh at Yourself - listen at [14:45] Comedy is about connection. You tell something about your life, something honest and true and usually uncomfortable. The comedians job is to transform your pain. Like an alchemist. "I make fun of myself," Jim said. "I give my own personal examples, but I think if I'm doing that at least I'm being truthful and I'm not coming from a place of thinking I'm better than that guy... like who am I?" They laugh because it's a safe way for people to experience their own demons. You can get close enough to the shadows of your life without the fear of being overrun by guilt or shame. It's a chance for us all to be a little more human, a little more honest and a little more free. The Umbrella Theory - listen at [28:50] Jim just started writing another book. He's on TV. He's touring. He's got a radio show (Jim Norton and Sam Roberts on Sirius), he has a podcast. He works with incredible talent. And is always looking for new material from his own life. "You can't just be lazy," he said. "I talked to Chris Rock recently and I know it sounds like I'm name dropping, but I'm not. "That's a total name drop," I said. "But I didn't mean it like that..." We talked about Chris Rock's career. He stopped touring. He hadn't been on the road for seven years. But yet you still hear his name all the time. He's hosting the Oscars, testing out material at clubs, etc. To succeed in any area, right now list all the things that... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

HOW TO DISCOVER THE SECRETS IN LIFE The best things in life are born from coincidence. I am a firm believer in this. A year ago I was flying back from California. I started talking to the guy sitting next to me. Turns out he had worked in almost every branch of government related to intelligence and diplomacy. Now he runs his own private intelligence company. He has information about every government in the world. He is paid a lot of money to reveal and analyze that information. But when we were on the plane, for basically four or five hours I asked him everything I could and got the most incredible detail about the state of affairs in the world. I'm almost afraid to reveal what we spoke about on the plane. Everything from "how to catch a liar" to "What is the Nigerian government specifically doing about oil prices" to "Will Trump win?" (and his answer turned out to be stunningly accurate). Then...a lost touch with him. He was just a guy I sat next to on the plane for a few hours. We got off and went to live our separate lives. Until now. His new book is out: "Warnings" written with uber-diplomat Richard Clarke. What is he warning about? Everything. Where are the hidden potential catastrophes around the world. And how can we live with them. And how can we avoid them. And how can we figure out the warnings after these? He answers, he analyzes, he proves, and he does it from his 30 years of experience uncovering these things for the US government and now, through his company, for other governments and large institutions that can afford him. The key is: "that can afford him". Because now he comes on the podcast and just like the coincidence of meeting him a year ago, he answers all of my questions again about his book. About the "Warnings". I love when coincidence intersects real life. I saw his book, remembered him from our interaction, and we had the best time on the podcast. Read the book, listen to the podcast, and don't ignore the coincidences in your life. (But he is.) R.P. Eddy is the CEO or Ergo, one of the greatest super intelligent firms in the world. Governments hire him and his firm to spy on other governments. "Hopefully, I wasn't too indiscreet," he said, referring to the time on his plane. I told him not to worry. "If you're not arrested by the end of this podcast, then you're okay." In his book, "Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes," R.P. covers all the major world catastrophes that could've been predicted and prevented: 9/11, Madoff, Fukushima, the financial crisis, AIDS, climate change. If we can learn to predict these, or at least learn how to figure out how the correct experts are, then a lot of pain can be avoided. Experts warned us. But no one listened to them. R.P. calls these people "Cassandras." The name comes from greek mythology. Apollo (a god) wanted to sleep with Cassandra. She refused. So Apollo cursed her. "She could foretell any future disaster. She could see it in vivid color," R.P said. But the curse was that no one believed her. So she burned to death in a terrible attack. (An attack she knew was coming...) These people exist in real life. And R.P. wants us to notice them. So R.P, and his coauthor, Richard Clarke, started "The Annual Cassandra Award." They're giving away cash prizes (up to $10,000) to motivate people to find and nominate a true "Cassandras." This is the formula for spotting a "Cassandra..." How to detect a truth-teller (listen at [55:25]) The "Cassandras" featured in R.P's book are experts in their field. They have been for years. He told me about Laurie Garrett, the head of global health for the Council of Foreign Relations. She's the first person to ever win the Polk, the Pulitzer and the Peabody. "She foresaw the rise of HIV/AIDS when she was a radio reporter in San Francisco," R.P. said. "She saw these men dying of a disease called 'gay related immune deficiency,'... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

His platoon was counting on him. He couldn't come back a failure. Brandon had been deployed to the Middle East four times. He'd seen the ugliness and destruction war had caused. And now he was being sent straight to sniper school. This is one of the most stressful jobs as a Navy SEAL. He would have to learn how to make quick decisions. Hard decisions. "The only easy day was yesterday," he said. "That's our motto." Brandon is one of the most accomplished sniper teachers of his time. He changed the system. And implemented positive reinforcement, which allowed him to see firsthand how having a good "mental mindset" propels people into success. In his memoir, "The Red Circle" and his newest book, a New York Times bestseller "The Killing School: Inside the World's Deadliest Sniper Program," Brandon shows you exactly how to train for a "champions mindset." He uses mental management strategies: visualization, positive self-talk, solution-based thinking and so on. He is the master of his own fate. And now you can be too... -- Here's what we talk about: [6:08] - I don't normally do this. But this time I gave away the "table of contents" of what I wanted to discuss with Brandon Webb: - I wanted to cover Brandon's ideas on war- discuss the issue of teaching people to kill people (to me, this is the elephant in the room)- Brandon was one of the first deployed to Iraq. So I wanted to ask about his ups and downs going to war, coming back and going to war again -"Obviously, I don't want to learn how to be a sniper" I said, "but what I really want to talk about is peak performance." Both of Brandon's books to talk about this, especially his section on "mental management." I wanted to learn what tools and habits I need to do today to make myself a master of my own fate. That's essentially what this show is about... becoming the master of your own fate. "Choosing yourself." [30:16] - I needed to know. Islam itself. What is the fight? Is this really a fight of religions? I asked Brandon why radicalism has spread so quickly in the Middle East. He pointed out the economics and the gap between rich and poor. "The social and political situation is not very good... Saudi Arabia, for example, has a very elite royal ruling class but the working population is very poor." He said people join the fight because they need a cause. They need to belong to something. A military is a tribe. I get this question all the time. "How do I find my purpose?" Some people find their purpose in a fight. In a mission. In a cause... Brandon explained that the people who join these radical groups, or any group, were probably suffering in life. And they wanted to fill a hole in their life. They wanted what any human wants: a feeling of belonging. That's the powerful force pulling them in. When Brandon was 16, his dad threw him off a boat in Tahiti. Brandon had to find his way back. And eventually he joined the military, became a Navy SEAL and then became a special ops sniper. There were 23 of them and 220 tried out. The question he gets most often is one of ignorance, "How many people did you kill?" But that's not what it's about for Brandon. And maybe that's what separates good from evil. He continued to tell me how radical governments incentives people to join "the cause." He said they pay you to become a martyr. I couldn't believe it. "Is that true?" I asked. "Yeah," he said, "As a state sponsor of terror, Iran is funding and fueling the conflict in the Middle East, especially with Israel." And the Internet makes it worse, too. Brandon tells me how... [59:03] - Brandon was training people to be peak performers in incredibly high stake situations. It wasn't just target practice. Someone would be shooting back. He expected each and every one of his students to perform at a perfect level. Eighty and ninety percent was no longer acceptable. I wondered how you could teach someone... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I almost changed forever the entire way people define relationships. The word "commitment" would have a new meaning. More babies would be born. I'm thinking BIG. Sometimes you want to try an idea and you don't let yourself think about money. If an idea is good, money is a side effect. Ideas are the real currency. I met a brand new couple for breakfast. J and K. They told me they just had the "going steady" conversation. "How'd you guys meet?" "J-Swipe". Or something like that. I forget. It was an online dating app. "What does 'going steady' mean when you are both in your 40s?" I asked. J was in his 40s. K wasn't. I wondered if 'going steady' meant that he gave her a ring or something. There's only so many more 'going steady's you have left in you at that age. They both pulled out their phones. They were looking at each other's phone and then showing me. "We deleted all of the dating apps on our phone," she said. But they were both peering at each other's firm. They needed confirmation. Hmmmm! Idea: The "Going Steady" App Both sides of the couple sign in to the app. Then they select the other person. Then when both sides select each other, the app deletes all the dating apps on their phone. If they ever download a dating app again, the other side gets notified by email. Or if they "de-select" each other from "Going Steady" then both sides get notified by email. Simple! Extras: - Notify FB and Twitter that they are "Going Steady" - Keep track of anniversaries, gifts, places they go, significant memories, etc. - Notify friends of anniversaries, etc. BOOM! The next day I wrote up the "spec", which was actually just similar to what I wrote above. I logged into freelancer.com. I opened a new project and cut and pasted my Spec in there. It was weird to read prior chats I had had on the site. Since the last time I had uploaded a project in there was in 2006. A customer service representative popped up a window and asked if I need help. I said, "Sure, why not?" Meanwhile, within ten minutes I had about ten people bid to do my project. I included in the Spec that they had to not only complete the app in 30 days but upload to the Apple store, the Google Play store, and do basic marketing for me. People were bidding from China, India, and Kenya. The average bid was $1000. I chatted with each one of them to make sure they understood what I was asking. My basic test was this question: can an app on Android and Apple detect and delete other apps on Android and Apple? The customer service representative recommended a developer as well. This developer cost more than $1000. More like $3500. That's ok. I just wanted a good job done. A small price to pay to change the future of evolution. I asked this developer the same question. Some of the developers would not upload to the stores or do any marketing. I crossed them off. Others didn't seem to understand my question about detecting other apps on the phone. I crossed them out. I didn't want any communication problems with people from the opposite side of the world. Finally, the recommended developer said, "I know you can do this on Android but not sure on Apple. Let me research." Five minutes later he came back. "It's impossible to do this on Apple." We tried to figure out a work-around. Like if the device owner gave permissions, etc. But there was no work-around. "Ok," I said, "thanks for your help." End of idea. End of project. Total time it cost me: 45 minutes, from writing the spec, logging into the site, creating the project, talking to the developers. Total money: I paid $29 to have a customer service representative help me. Success? Failure? Neither. It was an idea. I did the execution basics to see if I should pursue further. It didn't. But I learned a lot. What it would cost to make an app, I learned a bit more about the Apple store, and I went through the process of trying to find a developer.... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shortcuts - [5:40] - I asked Garry, "What separated you from people just as talented?" He interrupted. Finally! I found my match! "Wait, wait wait, slow down," he said. "'As talented' is a stretch." He said he was lucky. His upbringing made him a champion. "I was born in a family where chess was part of the culture. My father and mother usually spent their winter nights looking at the newspaper chess sections, solving problems. Also, I was born in the Soviet Union so when my talent was discovered, I had an opportunity to be taught by semi-professionals. Then professionals. The framework for my talent to be discovered and to be polished was there." He said, "You may call that luck, but the talent was quite unique." That's how you become a peak performer. You have to pursue your talent and get a little lucky. But it's never just luck. "As soon as I discovered chess I started moving very quickly." He beat the kids his own age and older. By age 12 he was the Soviet junior champion. Peak performance comes from talent, luck and an ability to move up in the ranks faster than your competition. How do you do that? [11:44] - I feel like I'm always trying to figure out my life. I'm always planning. Because I think if I subtract X from my life, add Y, and multiply by 100, I'll be happy. Garry told me how he takes a step back. He said you need to see the big picture. That's why he started drawing all his chess matches. After each game, Garry drew the board, he looked at what happened and he saw where he went wrong. "I could feel at at every game, I was getting better," Garry said. "I was learning." That's why I write everyday. It takes my mind out of the equation. I get to see what I'm doing. And how my life is. I stop making moves. And I just breathe. Then I see clearly. The key is to create a ritual of reflection. Writing, drawing. Do something that let's you see the board. See your life. [27:40] - Sometimes Garry had ten steps planned out. Other times, nothing. Garry said, "In the cases where you don't have a clear preference, go with your natural instinct." [34:55] - Garry was beat by Deep Blue, IMB's "genius" computer. It was the first time a machine beat the human brain at chess. People said it was a revelation. And the end was near. The same thing happened when ATM's were invented. Everyone thought bank tellers were going away. .And before that the elevator operator was eliminated. People went on strike. "This is a normal development of technology," Garry said. "If you have something really disruptive, it means it kills jobs before it creates new jobs." Sometimes jobs are replaced. Sometimes they're not. As humans our biggest shortcoming is that we let our fear precede any real threat. Machines don't have fear. But they also don't have the ability to dream... "We all do have fears," Garry said. "The question is how do we handle it... I want people to not be afraid of this progress because there are so many things we can bring back if we start dreaming again. By the way machines cannot dream. Even in sleeping mode." -- Also, if you like today's show, subscribe! Then you won't have to check back and you'll be first to hear new episodes. Thanks! -James ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jon is paralyzed from the neck down. He couldn't crawl. "My mom noticed I was dragging my legs," he said. The doctors said he'd die at age two. But he felt like he had something to contribute to the world. So he became unstoppable. He started writing for free. "I couldn't be paid," he said. If he earned a decent income, Jon would lose his Medicaid. His reputation as a writer grew. So he started consulting. And made 30,000 dollars in 24 hours. "At first, I charged $99. And 300 people signed up." He raised his prices. Then built online courses that taught people how to guest-blog and started another "premium" consulting service. "I made half a million dollars in 9 months," he said. The work lets him pay his own health benefits and live life for himself. Now, Jon Morrow is the CEO of SmartBlogger. He helps bloggers increase traffic, improve their writing, and make money. Jon believes any limitation can be overcome, although not easily. His story continues to inspire thousands around the world. Shortcuts - [23:00] - Jon told me how he developed a sense of self worth. Hear how he did it. - [26:25] - "When I got into kindergarten, another kid called me disabled, and I said, 'What does that mean?' And, he started laughing." Jon's teacher came over and said, "You don't know what that means?" He didn't. So he asked his mom. She thought about it and said, "It means you can't do something as well as someone else. But it also goes the other way." She said, "Everyone in the world can't do something as well as someone else..." So everyone in a sense is disabled. Jon focussed took inventory of his skills. Then he mastered them. Learn how you can hone your abilities, too. - [29:00] - Jon had twelve job offers after college. But he couldn't accept any of them. He had to keep his medicaid. And if he exceeded $700 per month, the government would take it away. So he found a loophole. He worked for free. Then years, later Jon asked for favors and ended up making half a million dollars in just 9 months. Find out how he initially did it here. - [1:11:50] - Jon was paralyzed from the neck down. He needed to reconstruct his reality. "I can only move my facial muscles," he said. He would've went crazy. But he made a new plan. "I started listening to audiobooks and podcasts 4-8 hours a day." His goal was to spend more time listening to inspirational stories, than he actually spent in his own life. I needed to understand, "Why was that your goal?" He said, "If you spend the majority of your time in worlds where people are accomplishing incredible things, all of a sudden that started to seem normal to me." Listen how Jon reconstructed his reality - [1:16:20] - Jon said, "A lot of people are under the assumption they can get whatever they want without trading something that they have. And that's just not the case." When he hears a success story, he looks for the price. What did they sacrifice? Money? Sleep? Time? Relationships? Everything has a price. But how do you know what price you're willing to pay? Jon tells you how. -- Also, if you like today's show, subscribe! Then you won't have to check back and you'll be first to hear new episodes. Thanks! -James ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts!... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I remember sitting at my cubicle job looking at people wondering, "Why? Why are you here? Why are you doing this?" I asked a friend once, "Don't you think this job is meaningless?" He said no. And then I knew what I had to do. I had to quit. And I did (eventually). First I spent time building up my own business on the side. I don't know if I've ever really believed in myself. I just knew I didn't want the life I had. Sometimes believing in yourself just means you don't believe in what you're doing right now. And you have to change. Sara Blakey felt this way, too. She woke up one day, looked at her life and said, "I'm in the wrong movie." Now she's a self-made billionaire entrepreneur. But my friend Ryan Deiss said believing in yourself is possible. And I wanted to know more. He started his first business in college. And made $100K in revenue the first year. He sold eBooks online. "I had books on pretty much any topic," he said. One was about baby food. Then he partnered with mommy bloggers and sold it to their readers. (That's the formula for a great strategic partnership. Create something useful. Find someone with an untapped audience. Someone who's talking to the people you want to talk to but who isn't not offering what you have to offer.) Now, years later, he's the founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer. He's a transformer. He teaches people how to build profitable online businesses. He walked me through it. He told me about digital marketing. And how people use these skills everyday to start and grow their own businesses.. Here's what he said.. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Over the past five years, I've seen Ryan Deiss rise from a quality entrepreneur to one of the biggest names in Internet marketing. He's the founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer and anybody in the internet marketing space knows Ryan Deiss. He emailed me at 4am. He said, "I realized the promise that was made to millenials-- the same one that was made to me, and probably the same one that was made to you-- "Go to college. You'll get a good job," simply isn't true anymore." The old promise is no longer true. But there's a new promise.... We're going back to a society where mastery matters. And grades don't. But still....most parents want to send their kids to college. Have them waste the four years, and even the money. Get into debt. "It will pay off," they think, even though the data shows incomes for people ages 18-35 have been going straight down for 25 years. So how do you grow? Invest in yourself. Shortcuts - [7:42] - People say you go to college to learn how to be an adults. "The best place to learn to be an adult is to go and get a job," he said. "You can socialize around peers in the workforce. I met my wife in college. I'm thankful for that, but I think to call your first couple of years college the place where you learn to be an adult is mildly absurd." - [17:45] - Ryan told me the top two things he looks for when hiring a candidate... and it's not a college degree. - [18:07] - Learn how to add value and move up in any job. - [25:18] - Ryan has four kids. Sending them to college would cost over a million dollars. But he said he would do it. But he has a few conditions: they have to get a job or internship. They need to test the market. And see if that's really the right fit for their lifestyle. Hear Ryan's advice on how to go through college the right way. - [28:44] - "I think if we acknowledge that a college degree is not a prerequisite to success or happiness in life than we will not as parents, or as kids, or as educators, or as employers, determine that it is a necessary requirement," Ryan said. We talked about the financial burden on kids and parents. It's not the best decision to go to a "four-year-long summer camp to find yourself." There are other options. - [32:21] - One alternative is an internship. Or apprenticeship. "I believe business owners like myself, like you, (people who hire people), I believe we should carry more of the burden of education on our backs," Ryan said. "If we're willing to make that investment, we'll recruit and retain some of the smartest people in the world." I was confused. "What do you mean by burden of education?" I said. "Will you take actual time and money to be part of someone's educational process?" He said "yes." -- Hey James here. Thanks so much for listening. If you like the show, subscribe! I have a new episodes every week. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dave Asprey is the creator and bestselling author of "The Bulletproof Diet." He biohacks health. And discovers innovative ways to live longer, lose weight, increase brain function and evolve better. My brain isn't hacked (yet). So I needed to talk to Dave. We did a podcast and I asked him "how do you evolve better?" Shortcuts: - [14:00] - Energy is scarce. We get tired. So I asked Dave what he does specifically to enhance his energy levels? - [21:40] - Aging is scary... Dave told me what he takes every day to slow down the aging process. This is importance because the environment is affecting how we age. We live in WIFI dense areas. We're constantly stressed. Our diets fluctuate and so on. "We call it aging. Over time, your ability to power your body goes down, and that doesn't have to happen. It is within your control to fix it," he said. "You can tell the battery in your body to recondition itself and you can give it a better power source. Or you can let it slowly grind down..." - [39:50] - I never know what to eat. Once time I went on an all fruit diet. Another time I fasted for three days and passed out while playing ping pong with friends. Dave told me what to eat and what to avoid. He even told me which foods are worse than cigarettes. - [44:40] - "I like to go all in," Dave said. He told me exactly what he does from the moment he wakes up. - [53:00] - I asked Dave, "What do we do to evolve better?" He told me how to take charge of your body and manage stress. -- Hey James here. Thanks so much for listening. If you like the show, subscribe! I have new episodes every week. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The cocaine made his throat close. "I was about to die". He wanted to be an actor. He wanted to be creative. He had dreams. And working real-estate for his father wasn't one of them. "I didn't want to come down," he said. "Why'd you do it?" "I really wasn't happy with myself," he said. "I believe it was because I wasn't my authentic self doing what I really wanted to do in my life." "Nepotism got me the job." And it was killing him. He was suffocating. Now Scott Steindorff is the producer of "Empire Falls," "Chef," (one of my all time favorite movies), "The Lincoln Lawyer," "Love in the Time of Cholera," and more. He's worked with Paul Newman, Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr., Matthew McConaughey, Scarlett Johansson, the list goes on. The other day he called me, a few days after we shot the project, to tell me about brand new projects he was working on that were different than anything he had done before. He is constantly testing the limits of his creativity. I wanted to know how he became his "authentic self." How did he go from being depressed and self-medicated to a successful and happy movie producer? I wanted to know because I don't think we ever really know. I think part of self-awareness is never quite getting there but always moving (hopefully) in the right direction. And creativity is something that needs to be constantly reinvented. Once creativity stays the same, it is no longer creative. Scott found a way to constantly be creativity. I want to learn how. "It's not easy at all," he said. "You have to do the leg work." "What's the leg work?" I asked Here's what he said: Step 1: FIND OUT WHAT YOU'RE CRAVING These are the two types of cravings: a) Depletion: Your body needs something. It can be water, a vitamin or mineral or a change. That's where reinvention comes in. b) Addiction: I felt powerless. I was addicted to money. More was never enough. Then I left Wall Street. Because they were the supplier. Scott wanted euphoria. He craved it. "I grew up wanting to be a skier and an actor and here I was in an office making money," Scott said. "I started craving that feeling of euphoria and excitement and passion for life." So he started doing cocaine. "Nobody knew I had a problem," he said. " I would do it by myself. So when I checked into rehab, it was a shock to my family." The patients had to drink some type of alcohol until they threw up. "By the second day, I said to the doctor, 'This isn't working for me. I'm a cocaine addict not an alcoholic." He thought they'd try something new. He thought they'd help. No. "Well... leave," the doctor said. "There was a shift in my consciousness. I went to my room. I cried uncontrollably for 24 hours. All the stress and pressure left me and from that moment on I haven't used for almost 33 and a half years." "What do you mean the stress left you?" I said. I couldn't imagine. He told me it just left. No explanation. He just saw his own choice. And he took it. I think most people don't know what they really want in life. We talked about adapting. And I said it seems like you have to surrender and be okay with the changes... even while you're depressed. "Isn't depression a lack of your expression?" he said. I never thought of it that way. Maybe I'm filling one need with sand when I really crave water. Step 2: ASK QUESTIONS I'm not in a 12-step program, but I want to understand who I am as my authentic self. So I asked what can I do right now? "Ask yourself questions," he said. "How Am I feeling? How do I feel about myself, do I love myself, am I feeling less than? Do I feel guilt?" "But what if you're lying to yourself?" "You can't lie to yourself," he said. "You're just denying the truth. If you're listening to this, it's coming to the surface. Don't push it down." Step 3: ACT IT OUT It's easy to come up with ideas. It's harder to act on them. I always say, actions are more important... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I tried to ruin Ryan Holiday's life. Fortunately, I failed. I told him to start an agency, build it up, sell it for 10 million dollars and THEN start writing books. "It's a good thing you didn't listen to me," I said. But I was wrong. It turned out he took my advice. "It made me super unhappy and it cost me a bunch of friendships," he said. "But it's not your fault. I know there are a lot of things that could make me money, but what I really like is writing. That's what I want my life to be." "So what if you don't know what you want your life to be?" I asked. "What should you do?" "That's the essential question," he said... A) SELF-WORTH IS NOT NET-WORTH Most writers die penniless. I can't think of a profession where I can name as many suicides as writing. I'm jealous of the people who don't write actually. Making business deals and going to work is so much more profitable than trying to tear your soul apart and put words on a piece of paper most people won't read. There's only one writer in history to become a billionaire. (J.K. Rowling, if you're reading... come on my podcast!) So why does anyone do it? I don't know. I do it because it's what I would do if I had nothing again. It's what I would do with everything. It's the one thing that makes me feel like I am going places without moving. B) VICTIM OR HERO Everyone wants to be the hero of their own story. I do. But I chose victim for years. I lost everything and I wanted the world to pick me back up. I'm not mad at the world for leaving me on the floor. I'm grateful. Because it let me pick myself up. It let me choose myself. "Stoicism is a practical philosophy and it works," Ryan said. "Define 'works'." "At its core, it says you don't control the world around you. You control how you respond to the world around you." He told me about the two most prominent practitioners of Stoicism. One was Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor. He had all the power in the world. His favorite Stoic was a slave, Epictetus, who was banished from Rome by a past emperor. "You have extreme wealth and power using the philosophy, and it's helping them," Ryan said. "And then you have extreme adversity, difficulty and powerlessness using the philosophy and it's helping them. To me, that's working." C) LOOK FORWARD TO THE BAD THINGS People are losing their jobs. And they're afraid. I asked Ryan if the Stoics have a practice for fear. He said, "The Stoics call that amor fati, which in Latin means 'a love of fate...' You look forward to the bad things because they were made just for you." D) MAKE YOUR JOB IRRELEVANT This is the key to all advancement in life. Make your job irrelevant. Burn the bridges behind you. "You should be trying to make your job or your role irrelevant because what you're actually proving is that you know how to do things, you know when something is working, and you're able to come up with the next thing," Ryan said. "When an employee comes to you and says, 'I know my job was to run this marketing department, but over the last 6 months I've automated X and Y. I've hired someone who's incredibly talented, sales are up X percent and I don't have that much to do.' Your boss doesn't go to their boss and say, 'Well how do we get rid of James?" They go, "James is f**king killing it.'" "That's how you work through or up an organization," he said. "No one says, 'Your book was so amazing Ryan, we don't need anymore books from you.' They go, 'What are you writing next?'" E) DON'T BE AN ADDICT I was listing the pillars of Stoicism. I wanted to know if I understood. So I said, - Integrity, (universal integrity, for example: never lie to get what you want) - Fairness (Help the people around you. Even if it hurts you. If it helps someone more than it hurts you, it's just.) Then Ryan jumped in. "Temperance," he said, which means don't be an addict to some other force. Don't be an addict to anything. F)... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"You and I both know what happened to you 18 months ago," he said. "If you don't write about it, you will die as an artist." Tucker's sold over 3 million copies of his books. I know I'm going to have to listen to him. Maybe later. ----- I've known Tucker many years. I can safely, say, I've been in the trenches with Tucker. We've both started businesses since then, published books, invested together, and cried (well, I did) together since we've met. In one of the worst personal disasters of my life, Tucker was there. He was there for the beginning, middle, and end. I always ask myself 'who is in my scene'? What's a Scene? I consider it: - the people I learn from - the people who I can count on - the people who challenge me to work harder and rise to my potential (and I can do the same for) - the people I can call when I am confused or troubled, and the people who are there for me no matter what. Ask yourself: Who is in your scene? --- Without a scene, it is much harder to succeed. Ask Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Sara Blakely and many many others who have risen to the top of their fields throughout history. Tucker and a few others have been in my scene for years. So I visited him. Talked reinvention, writing, and his current business success. Here's the top five things I learned: A) THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PEOPLE WHO SUCCEED AND PEOPLE WHO DON'T "No one has ever replicated anything I did because they looked at the surface. They didn't actually understand the underlying input." "What do you mean by input?" I asked. "People look at my writing and they say, 'I get drunk, I fall down, I yell curses... I'm going to write really arrogant things. Then I'll get the same attention Tucker Max gets.' But that never works." "I was opening my soul," he said. "I was being honest. Anybody trying to mimic me forgot the honesty part." That's the work. That's the input. "If you want to boil it down, people who succeed are worried about input. People who don't succeed are worried about output." ---- B ) DIFFERENT > BETTER Spaces are getting crowded. Anyone can blog. Anyone can make a youtube video. Self-publishing is growing. And they're handing out podcasts at all the major international airports. More and more people are getting creative. More creativity = more competition. So how do you stand out? Micro-tribes. "I'm talking about being different, which is not the same thing as being better," Tucker said. "When I started writing, I wrote emails for my friends and my only measurement for whether the emails were good or not was whether those nine guys thought it was funny. There was no arguing. If they did, it was good. If it didn't, it was bad." This reminded me of how Craig from Craigslist built his company. Started out with an email, with the sole intention of providing pleasure for his friends. Provide benefit for the few, and then you can scale to provide benefit for the many. Tucker found his micro-tribe. And it grew. Because his did this... --- C) TELL THE TRUTH People send me articles all the time, "Can you read this?". I read one the other day. "How to survive a breakup" But the author left out his story. Advice is autobiography. Don't give me advice from the mountaintop. Tell me the story of the struggle. Of how you were the very reluctant hero, who was called into action for better or worse, who climbed the mountaintop, who now has the knowledge. Your story is the only test: Are you original? "I'll give you a super simple trick to being original," Tucker said. "Tell the truth. The hard truth that everybody thinks and nobody says." --- D) ASK YOUR QUESTION Last week I did seven podcasts. I probably asked 1000 questions. So I asked Tucker, "What's the skill? How does one become a good writer?" He had one answer: Self-evaluate. Tucker asks himself three questions: Am I what I think I am? Am I who I want to be? Am I good at... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I have a rule. After every podcast, I write down 10 things I learned. I don't know if anyone else does this. Do you do this? Some people make illustrations. They send me what they've learned. It's a creation of a creation of a creation. A drawing of a podcast of someone's life. But I broke my rule. It's been over a month. And my brain is digging for the lessons from my interview with the creator of Wordpress. I think I have Alzheimer's. Matt was 19 years old when he started Wordpress. It was 2003. Now Wordpress.com gets more traffic than Amazon.com. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both use Wordpress. I use Wordpress. I wanted to know if it's still worth the time and effort to make your own site. He said it is. That's how you break out... "We're trying to revitalize the independent web," Matt Mullenweg said. He's 33 now. "It's not like these big sites are going anywhere. They're fantastic. I use all of them, but you want balance. You need your own site that belongs to you... like your own home on the Internet." This is part of Matt's code. Not Wordpress's "code." Matt's like a robot. I mean that as a compliment. There are many signs of this: language, ability, he's very exact. I had to interrupt. He was talking in code. And it was my job to translate. He said, "If I send you a unit of work..." "I don't mean to interrupt," I said. "I'm a little bit of an interrupter. So I apologize in advance, but you talk in a very code-like language... 'a unit of work.' How about 'a task?' That works as well." He laughed. And thanked me for translating. The podcast continued. He told me about his personal code (again, robot). People have values. Geniuses and other advanced forms of life have "code." So here's Matt's... A) Measure what's important to you. Matt wrote a birthday blog. He does this every year to measure what's changed. It lists how many books he's read over the past year, countries he traveled to and so on. He's very specific. It's a measurement of his personal freedom. He can see where time went. And if he chose himself. "You cannot change what you don't measure," Matt said. So this year, I wrote a birthday blog. B) Own the work you do "Other sites provide space," he said. "They provide distribution in exchange for owning all of your stuff. You can't leave Facebook or Twitter and take all of your followers with you." That's why he recommends having your own website. It's yours. Not Facebook's. Not Business Insider's or Huffington Post's. It's yours. When I first started jamesaltucher.com, I picked a template, posted a blog, shared a link on Twitter and within 3-4 minutes I had traffic. C) Ignore concern Matt dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco when he was 20. "Were your parents upset?" "They've always been supportive," he said. "But they were concerned." That didn't stop him. He had direction. And when you know where you're going, you don't ask for directions. Sometimes I feel like I'm driving with the wrong address in my GPS. And Siri won't stop re-routing. So what I learned from Matt: Reroute yourself as many times as it takes. Reinvent. Put someone else's concern for your wellbeing on your gratitude list. But don't let it stop you. Don't let it get in the way of your code. D) The myth of loyalty When Matt moved and started his first job, he made more than his dad did. "I got an amazing salary," he said. I kept wondering if his parents were upset. I don't know why. "Were they upset?" He said no. Again. But then he explained. "Learning spreads organically." And when he moved, it helped spark possibility for his dad. "He worked at the same company for 26 or 27 years. He more than doubled his salary when he left. It made me so sad. I never want anyone to be in the situation my dad was in," he said. "He gave the loyalty of decades and they didn't... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

She said, I am an introvert but had to develop tricks to fake being an extravert because of where I worked. I said, Do you think everyone in LA is an extravert? She said, I don't know. Maybe they are all faking. We were at a party. I had been sleeping but a friend called me up and said "you have to go this party three blocks away from you." So I did. Why? Because why not? Sometimes you know to say no. But to surrender to the moment, if nobody is getting hurt, sometimes you say yes. I went. It was crowded and I knew some of the people and some of the people I didn't. I didn't know her but we were introduced. "You have to ask her for [X} favor," the introducer whispered to me. But I never got around to the favor. I said, can you tell me some of the tricks? I asked because sometimes I feel I don't really know how to live and look like a normal person. Sometimes I like being home and writing and reading all day because that passes for human without me having to see, or touch, or talk to anyone. When I go outside, I often feel unhinged. Like I could float away. So I wanted to know. She didn't tell me at first. Please. Ok, she said, sometimes I would do what I call a "dare of the day". I would do something that I might be scared to do or was out of my comfort zone. I said, like what? She didn't want to tell me. Please. She squinted her eyes at my face then touched my cheek and rubbed her fingers together as if pulling something off my face. I would go up to people, strangers, and pretend to pull a wisp of hair off of their face. That would freak me out, I said. Both doing it and having some stranger touch my face. I would do all sorts of things like that. Ok, I said, I want to try this. Start me off. Tell me more or tell me what I should do tomorrow. She said, I can't. She made a motion with her fingers around her head the way people do when describing someone who is crazy. She said, Now that i've told you this your mind will start working on it. Tomorrow you will wake up and your body will know what to do. She told me the rest of her story, which was fascinating. Stay tuned for the podcast I hope she agrees to do. Then I went home. I woke up and I was upset about something that had happened earlier the day before. My friend Amy then had advice: go and eat pancakes and bacon and photograph it so I know you are eating. You have to prove it to me. I went. I ate. I photographed. Then my body knew what to do. I walked outside and there was a man and his daughter. I held up my hands with palms out, non-confrontational and said, "Good morning!" and they smiled and said good morning back. I started walking home. I saw a couple holding hands. Palms out, Good morning! And you [the girl] I love your blue hair. And you [the boy] I love your jacket. A pretty girl crossing the street. Good morning! She turned away and angled away from me as she walked past. I guess it might be taken the wrong way sometimes. Maybe it might not be attractive. I said to a guy opening up his store. Good morning! He smiled. Hey, good morning, guy. I said it all the way home. I got home. I didn't feel down anymore. The sun was coming in. I started to write. First I wrote the girl from the party and told her what happened. She wrote back (i'm going to paraphrase), don't record your dares. That's why I was hesitant to tell you the dares I did. Ok, other than this one, I won't. She said it will take a few weeks to figure out your boundaries on dares. Both personal and physical. She said, don't dare anyone else to do this. I didn't understand her reason. But maybe it would affect the way I did my own dares. SO DON'T DO THIS. I wanted to leave the party but I had one more question. What did you do after you were working in LA for so long as an assistant. She said, I went to get a PhD in Robotics at [best school in world for Robotics]. She laughed and I think she said, maybe that... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ben (of Ben & Jerry's) was in the room. He needed a logo. Debbie Millman just started her agency. She was competing against the best ad agencies in New York City. She lost. So she moved on to Burger King. "Why do you think you lost?" "We didn't have insurance," Debbie said. "We didn't have the big, global brand experience to show them." "I'll never forget this," she said. "When we got to Burger King headquarters, we got into a fairly small elevator with the Senior Vice President of Market Research. The door closes. He looks at us and says, 'Don't get your hopes up.'" This is important. Because Debbie Millman never describes herself as an entrepreneur. But she's the perfect example. Entrepreneurship is about putting your all into something, getting rejected and going back into the next room. Data is taking over. Data is replacing thinking and driving the direction of the future. Data sells confidence. And that's what the brands wanted. Burger King tried changing their logo 7 times in the decade leading up to Debbie's success. So she did focus groups. And studied eye-tracking on the original logo. "We wanted to know what people thought," she said. "We wanted to get a sense of why this was so beloved?" "People do not read first. First and foremost, they see color. Then they see numbers, then shape, and then, if you still have their attention and they understand what you put in front of them, then they will read." A logo is a message. Even if you don't read it. You can recognize logos visually without reading. Our brains know. Then we choose who we belong to. And that's our tribe. Debbie was changing the face of an iconic brand. And change causes fear, which strikes up all the stress hormones in our body. "In order for us to create an identity that was evolving from the original, we had to keep some of those iconic elements." You're original. As a baby, you were a blank canvas. No logo. No brand. No name. And no identity. Then you went to school and made friends and things happened to you. Someone asked me, "who will you always be? Who's James? When you're 4, 14, 24, 34, 44, 84, what parts of you will always be there?" That's what Debbie had to figure out with her brands. She did it with Tropicana, Star Wars, and eventually, she won Ben & Jerry's over too. But after all of this data, all of this color, all of this branding, at the heart of it is the essence of who you are. What is the logo of your heart. Debbie figured out hers. And created her life around it. Figuring out who we are is the key to having an impact all over the world. That's what Debbie taught me on this podcast. That's what I try every day to create in my own life. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tony Robbins stopped by on his birthday. And then he started causing problems. Like he does. "I realize you're high energy," the audio engineer says, looking at Tony, "but when you bang the table it sounds like the whole room is shaking." In 220 podcasts, it's the first time the audio engineer had to interrupt in the middle. "Oh, ok, no problem," Tony says. "I don't want to stop the passion," the audio engineer says. "Don't worry, I'll be good," Tony says. Then the audio engineer went back outside. Tony kept slamming that table. Outside the room, people thought he was going to climb over the table and beat the S**t out of me. But it was all good. BUT... I felt like I had to keep the energy level high. So pretty soon we were both yelling back and forth. He was there because of his new book, "Unshakeable". But we spoke about maybe 1000 topics. Not just the financial world. So let's get right down to it. What did I learn? - EVERY YEAR (on average) THE STOCK MARKET WILL FALL 10% This is great for newspapers. They say, "The world is ending!" and they say it EVERY SINGLE YEAR. And yet it never does. It never did. Even in 2008. The world did not end. The market is at all time highs right now. The key with Tony's book is he shows these statistics not so you can make money off of them but so you DON'T PANIC. Markets move. Ignore the news. - BRING IT Before the podcast I said to Tony, "let's do a fun outtake". I wasn't sure he'd say "yes". We videotaped it (it's on my instagram). He BRINGS IT. It's so much energy I almost had to stutter out my planned line ("I can't see your face on Skype, only your chest"). And when we did the podcast, I felt like I had to yell and really UP my own energy level at least three levels higher just to keep pace with him. I don't know how he does it. SO....! I asked. How do you do it? I want that energy also. Please? - DON'T ASK HOW, INSTEAD ASK 'WHY!?' He finally said, "Enough with the 'how-to'. Don't ask 'how-to' questions". He said, "Ask What and Why?" What is the Result. Why is your purpose. "Why are you getting out of bed in the morning? And what are you going to do about it? "Motive matters and brings energy". He said, "I love lighting people up." That, he said, gives me the energy. When I later found out his schedule, not only was he booked every hour that day with different news sources (he started the day by ringing the bell at the Nasdaq) but IT WAS HIS BIRTHDAY. He brings it. - TRADE YOUR EXPECTATIONS FOR APPRECIATIONS This is critical for well-being. Don't expect the world to provide you with happiness. Every time you find yourself slipping into an expectation, change it in your head into an "appreciation". Find the things you appreciate. Then take ACTION. "It's like a practice," I said. He banged the table. "Exactly!" - MODELING I said, "how do you learn new things?" He said, "Modeling." I said, "Well, I imagine you look great walking down a runway at a fashion show but seriously." He laughed and said, "Look, when I went to write the Money book and then my new book, Unshakeable, I didn't just sit around reading the paper. "I went out with a video crew and interviewed 50 billionaires about how they invest. "I watch what they do. I study how they think. And I see if I can break it down into chunks so that anyone can follow their process." In my last podcast with Tony, two years ago, he described how he learned how expert Marines improve their firing skills even though he had never fired gun before. He described almost the same process then. For me, I know this works. When I want to write, I always read first. When I want to do public speaking, I watch standup comedians (and singers) first. I want to figure out how the best people in the world do something so I can do it 1/100 as good at the very least. When I need energy now, I picture Tony Robbins smashing... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

My ancestor from 70,000 years ago was smarter than me. He knew every plant, mushroom, animal, predator, prey in a several mile radius. He knew how to make weapons. He knew how to capture something, make it edible. I can barely order delivery. And as far as weapons, they say "the pen is mightier than the sword" but I don't think a tweet is. My ancestor also knew how to adapt to new terrains, how to handle strangers who could be threats, how to learn who to trust and who not to trust. I wish I had his skills. Not only that. Archaeological evidence says his brain was bigger than mine. And bigger is better. To make things worse, another animal made the entire human race its slave. Wheat domesticated us. It forced us to stick around for the harvest, horde up for years when the harvest might be bad, go from a life of a diverse diet to basically all carbs all the time. And it turned us from hunters to farmers. But it's not all bad. And the news is actually very good. Probably the books I've recommended most in the past five years was "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari. And not only me: it's Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg's top recommendation. And now Yuval has a new book, "Homo Deus" - i.e. where are humans heading? If Sapiens explored the last 70,000 years of human history, "Homo Deus" takes the trends into the future. What will happen next? The answers are fascinating. And I had even more questions. I couldn't believe I was finally talking to Yuval after reading "Sapiens" so many times and recommending it on every list and giving the book to all of my friends. And then finally reading "Homo Deus". What made humans the only animal to spread across the entire globe? What was special about us? How did we go hundreds of miles into empty water to find Australia for instance? I would never take that risk! And then survive and flourish in a completely new ecosystem, just like we did in North America. "Fiction," Yuval told me, and describes in his book. "We created elaborate fictions for ourselves: 'nations', 'corporations', 'religion', 'crusades', and perhaps the most successful fiction: 'money'. So I could use a dollar and some stranger in China can use a dollar and we can trust each other enough to do a transaction." So what's next? "Homo sapiens are going to evolve again." Yuval said, "Technology is taking us there and technology is evolving much faster than we are." I still can't believe I spoke to him. Five years ago I took his course on Coursera. I was thinking, "how did this guy get so smart?" And now I was talking to him. And, like I said, the news was not bad. Here's what I learned: 1. The economy needs you to invest in yourself "There's a change in the nature of the economy from a material based economy to a knowledge-based economy. The main assets in the past were material like gold minds or wheat fields," Yuval said. "These are the types of things you can conquer through violence." That's how we got California. The US invaded and absorbed their wealth. But you can't invade and absorb knowledge. China isn't going to take over Silicon Valley and absorb all the wealth. "Today, the main asset is knowledge," he said. The only good investment you can make for your future is the investment you make in yourself today. Hone your idea muscle, build a network and a library of mentors, make a commitment to do one healthy thing a day. Because the health of your body impacts the health of your brain. I try to improve 1% a day. That's it. That's how I invest in myself. 2. Explore Internal realities vs. External realities Resources today are different. They're abstract. Yuval said, "The source of wealth in California today is knowledge, in the mind's of engineers and technicians and CEOs. And you just cannot conquer it by force." That's one of the reason's why Yuval says, "You see a decline in international violence." The other reason: weapons are too powerful.... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Imagine going on a swing as high as you can. Then going higher. Then going so high you loop around. I get scared thinking about it. Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, did it the first time he tried. Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal were training people at Google how to get into the state of FLOW. Sergey volunteered. What is Flow? The state where your brain and body loses all sense of time and you retreat into this perfect area of creativity and productivity. A state where Steven and Jamie have spent years trying to hack and re-create at will. And this is what they've done. I was talking to Steven Kotler, who's been on my podcast a few times and Jamie Wheal. They co-authored "Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work." It's sort of a sequel to "The Rise of Superman" all about "flow" in action sports. Steven said. "It's the moments of total absorption where you get so focussed on the task at hand that everything else just disappears, action and awareness merge, your sense of self disappears, time passes very strangely and all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof." But when I read it I thought, "Where are the chess players?" Where are the creatives? Programmers get into flow. Musicians, athletes, artists, all sorts of people get into flow. The question was "how?" I am selfish. I wanted to know for myself: HOW? So I read "Stealing Fire." It's about all the ways you can get into flow and other "optimal states of consciousness." It teaches you how to step outside yourself, have a 500% increase in your performance, functionality, creativity and have satisfaction. I had to find out, what are the triggers to get into flow? They said "risk." "Life or death?" I asked. "You need risk, but it's definitely not physical risk," Steven said. "The brain can't tell the difference between social fear and physical fear." Steven and Jamie figured this out when they went to Google to experiment on Sergey Brin's brain (Google's founder). They built a swing that loops 360 degrees around and covered him in EEG sensors. You'd have to pump your legs and use all your strength to gain the physical and mental momentum to go in a full circle. "My ten year old daughter crushed it," Jamie said. "She did 35 loops in 60 seconds, which is nudging the world record." Only a few people actually made it all the way around. Sergey's one of them. It takes intense focus. You have to overcome your fear and stay in the moment. You have to use risk to your advantage. "Anything that drives attention to the current moment drives flow," Steven said. It's not just swings. It's not just "smart drugs" or "extreme sports". On the podcast, Steven and Jamie give a range of techniques and ideas for how to get into flow. I want in. I want in ALL of the time. They have a quiz on their website (flowgenomeproject.com) that tells you your "flow profile." Over 50,000 people have taken it. On the first company I started I once disappeared into my office and programmed for about 24 hours straight. Completing a month's project in one day's time. We kept that client for life, even when we sold the company. Flow not only feels good, creates increased productivity and brain function, it's also a key skill to compete. I hope I can get back to that state again. Today. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I want to be a Jedi Knight. The idea of surrendering to some "force" greater than oneself. The idea of being in touch with some essence that can bring out my full potential in way that I could never possibly understand. When Cass Sunstein, genius economist (author of "Nudge", 40 other books, does Nobel-prize level research) wrote "The World According to Star Wars", I knew I had to talk to him. I reached out to everyone I knew, found a way to get ahold of Cass, who wasn't doing any interviews on the book, and managed to book some time with him. I've written many times before about the effect Star Wars has had on my life. But I was also interested in the phenomenon of Star Wars, a topic Cass writes about. In particular, why was it a hit? George Lucas is the living breathing manifestation of "idea sex". He takes concepts that worked in the past, meshes them together, and knows the combination will work. For example: think of a blonde-haired young man who has to reluctantly save the world from an evil galactic empire, uses laser powered swords and blasters, and meets a beautiful princess along the way. If you think "Flash Gordon" you'd be right. What you might not know is that George Lucas tried to buy the rights to the old TV serial "Flash Gordon". He wanted to make the movie. He was rejected so he made Star Wars. Or you might think Joseph's Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces", which George Lucas studied religiously before writing the script to Star Wars. Or you might think...any of a dozen influences George Lucas had and meshed together. His idea: to take the familiar, provide his own twists, and release. If the old influences were hits and he just changed one aspect (make a Western a Space Opera) there's a good chance he would have a hit. Cass Sunstein explores: what makes a hit? What makes a failure? What makes something a hit after it's been dead for years (example: Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" didn't sell at all while he was alive and is now considered one of the best-written books of all time). This is a topic I am obsessed with. Combine that with the topic of "Star Wars" and now Cass Sunstein has written a book I am obsessed with. We found a room to hide in and we spent the next hour laughing and swapping notes on the relevancy of The Force in today's world. We didn't talk economics, world history, behavioral psychology or any of the topics he is one of the best experts in the world in: We talked about what makes stories go viral. We talked about how much we enjoyed this cultural hit that changed generations. We were two kids talking about our favorite movie. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

My first podcast is 24 minutes long. It's just me. No guest. The topic: "Why College Is a Waste of Time." Then I did one about my book "Choose Yourself." One week later, I got 30 minutes with Robert Greene. Then an hour with Tucker Max, an hour with Gary Vaynerchuk, and an hour with AJ Jacobs. A month later I interviewed Dr. Wayne Dyer. Two months, Arianna Huffington. Six months, Mark Cuban. I didn't have an editor or a microphone. Three years later everyone has (or should do!) a podcast. It connects me with people I never thought possible. Or in AJ Jacobs' case, it connects people with family they didn't know existed. That's the theme of his new podcast, "Twice Removed." "The good news is once you realize that everyone is family, you can just choose," AJ said. "So you're not stuck. You've got the whole world to choose from." His first guest was Dan Savage, the sex columnist for "The Village Voice." In the other room, AJ had a secret guest, a relative 41 degrees removed from Dan. Along the way, AJ unravels the 41 connections. He had Dan in tears. "We're all connected," AJ said. "People have called genealogy the museum of me. We all see the world through our own lens." Here's what I learned from AJ's lens... 1. Start with X When I first started doing an interview podcast my audience size was X. Then I improved the quality and my downloads went to 3X. In the case of "Twice Removed," "Start Up" and "Freakonomics" adding production makes it 10X. "For every minute that makes the air there are hours that don't," AJ said. "You can make 18 different shows using the same material." The key is to do the best with what you have today. It cost $0 to make "The James Altucher Show." And I got to do what I never dreamed possible for the first 40 years of my life. 2. Show the truth The arc of a good story starts with a problem. Luke Skywalker wanted to explore but he couldn't until his aunt and uncle were killed by stormtroopers. Bruce Wayne's parents were killed in the first few panels of Batman. You need a problem to kickstart an otherwise reluctant hero. "I love to tell my kids about my family's failures," AJ said. "Honestly, I think they think I'm total loser." AJ told me about an Emory University study. It showed kids adjust better when they're told about their family's failures. "There's the narrative of 'We were always successful' or 'We're always losers.' Families are oscillating," AJ said. "You go through times where things are going well and times when it's total failure. Tell your kids about the struggles your family has undergone and that you emerged ok... that you survived." Give yourself permission to have an imperfect life. 3. Surprise Yourself AJ learned this from a writer at "The Daily Show." "He talked about how important it is to surprise yourself and make yourself laugh," AJ said, "which at the time I didn't really understand." So he tested it. "As you're writing, take a left turn that your brain didn't expect." He does this in "Twice Removed." And in our interview. He told me about an experiment he did with his wife. They filmed 24 hours of their day for weeks. Every argument was caught on tape. And they checked it frequently to see who was right. "It was bad either way," he said. "Because if I was wrong I looked like an idiot, but if I was right she would just get angrier." So they quit that experiment. And he started a new one: "Twice Removed." ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Anna Koppelman is an angel. She's the angel I wish I had looking over me back when I was being bullied. When I was a kid, it was "Lord of The Flies" on the playground. Nobody cared at all. Kids would kill each other at recess and whoever survived went back to class. But it's different now. Bullying is a thing. It has a voice. And there's a way out of the world of "you're not good enough" and into the world where you belong... I read an article on Facebook that was going viral:"What I know Now As a Teen With Dsylexia." Anna Koppelman wrote it. Then she kept writing. When I read the article, I thought Anna was one of those alien millennials taking over the world. But even worse, she's not a millenial. Ever since birth she's been on the Internet. She's an eleventh grader. Which makes her 17 or so. Generation Z... it's a totally different animal. Anna started a charity when she was 12 years old. At 14, she asked the Huffington Post to publish her work. They said yes. Then she wrote about dyslexia, bullying, intelligence, her crushes, her rejections, and each article felt like it was going a level deeper. Her writings were read everywhere by teens who had been through similar experiences. I wish I had this as a kid. A world where I could talk to people going through what I was going through. A way to connect to my "tribe". Or a way to reach out to people and we could all figure out we weren't alone. "I couldn't not say it," she said. "I had this feeling at school and in my life of just not being able to connect with people... I had a feeling of isolation since first grade, like there was Saran wrap between me and the rest of the world." Here's what I learned from Anna Koppelman about finding out where you belong... 1. Figure out another way When Anna's "friends" discovered she couldn't read, they laughed. "You're not smart enough to be our friend," they said. She was pushed out of the tribe. But then she learned from a moose. "I was watching the children's show, 'Arthur.' And there was this kid on there. He was a moose. He had dyslexia. So I turned to my parents and said, 'I have dyslexia.'" "How did this moose exhibit the dyslexia?" "It was all just about the same feelings that I was feeling... where he was behind in his class, but he had all these great ideas he wanted to get out but couldn't. And the feeling of being trapped because there's something in your brain that's processing differently." But she found another way. And learned how to read. But kids kept making fun of her. For the next 10 years. "I just wanted to connect with people," she said. "When I would write, I would be able to connect with people. When I would perform poetry, I would be able to connect with people." "What do you mean perform poetry?" I was confused. Because it sounded like her life was miserable at school. And instead of going to school with the eye patch and going straight home, she'd head back out to go read slam poetry in front of a dozen+ strangers. "What made you do that?" "I knew that no matter how awful school was there was a world outside of school and I just needed to find that world." 2. Use your skills Anna started out writing about her interests. People spend years writing about things outside themselves. I did too. But for years I was afraid to write about the things that really scared me, or drove me, or kept me up at night. I was afraid to write about the things that shamed me. Or I was afraid because I wondered what people would think. So I wanted to learn, what did Anna, at age 14, do differently? Start with craft. Write everyday. Use your brain. Develop your analytical muscle. Build your skills. Talent is the ignition in the car. Many people have talent. Many people never turn on the car. Many people never drive the car to get to their destination. Skills are just talent in its infancy. 3. Create from one layer deeper I asked Anna about... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sara Blakely is weird. I wish I could think like she does. I want to be weird like her. "I look at any object and try to think of any use it has other than what people had planned for it." And then she acts on it. She sees a pair of pantyhose, cuts off the feet (why not?) and creates a multi-billion dollar company, Spanx. She sees her 9 month pregnant belly and paints a basketball on it. And then inspires hundreds of other women to do the same. Creates a book out of it: The Belly Art Project, and donates the proceeds to charity. "All my life I was taught how to deal with failure," she told me. "My dad would ask us at the dinner table every night: how did you fail today?" HOW DID YOU FAIL TODAY? She got comfortable with failure at an age when every other kid wants to get an A+ at everything. She got comfortable embarrassing herself. For two years she tried to be a standup comedian. "I wasn't very good at it." Practice embarrassing yourself... Ready. Fire. Aim. She got a huge order from Nieman Marcus even though she didn't have the inventory or the production ready. She said, "YES!". Then she figured out how to get the order filled. Oprah listed Spanx as one of her "favorite things" of 2000. Oprah wanted to film her office. Sara had no office. She said, "YES!". Then she got an office and filled it up with people. Say YES! Then make things happen. Don't argue yourself into failure. Excuses are easy. Saying "yes" and then executing is hard. Get your thinking time. "It takes me five minutes to drive to work," she told me. "But I take 45 minutes. I use that time to think." It's important to think. To be creative every day. This is how she comes up with non-stop ideas to expand her brand, expand her products, and work on other projects. I suspect this is the secret for how she always sees things differently. Being creative is a practice. It's not lightening from above. It's taking the long route when you could've taken the short route. Purpose = Infectious salesmanship. While I was talking to Sara she used the word "empower" several times. Spanx clothes gives women more confidence. Empowers women. The Belly Art Project empowers pregnant women. It seems like there are three parts to a project that leads to master salesmanship. - the higher purpose for it. This gets people excited. - the actual product and its benefits. - execution Combine all three and people will get infected with your passion for your ideas. Sara was unstoppable. Don't volley. Don't engage with the people who want to argue with you. That's time wasted when you can be creative. Don't invite ego in the door. Once you've worked on your project, have passion for it, started it, be willing to take suggestions and listen to people. Ego can kill a project and close the door on good opportunities. Be aware of you mortality. Sara was selling fax machines for five years before fully launching Spanx. She could still be selling them if she never started. If she listened to all the people who tried to dissuade her. If she became afraid of the multi-billion dollar companies that could have easily squashed her. Except they didn't. She was one person and they were billions. But they lost. We are here only this precious small amount of time. Make every moment a work of art. Make every moment move you one step forward towards your dream and purpose. Invent a new undergarment even if you had never made clothes in your life. Get 100s of women to paint their pregnant bellies and then raise money for charity with the idea. "EVERYTHING IS A CANVAS," she told me. Which makes everyone a potential artist. What a great way to look at life. But I can't! Why not? For anything you want to do, for anything that excites you, take the time to figure out the next step. Ready. Fire. Aim. Just why not? Why not? ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

He is exactly one year younger than me, almost to the day. So we could've even grown up together. We had similar interests in music. He could've taught me sewing. I could've taught him how to play chess. But, to be honest, he worked harder than me. He stood on a corner and sold hats. Then he sold t-shirts. Then he would go to work at Red Lobster all night. Then back to school the next day. I was lazy as a kid. I couldn't work so hard. Six billion dollars later, Daymond John sits atop the FUBU fashion empire and I think to myself, "He's one year younger than me." Do you ever feel that: jealousy? Or if not jealousy, then maybe regret? Like there's so many things you could've done...if only... The good news is, "if only" has two answers: "You didn't do it then." And..."Start today." There's never any rush. If today is the day you can start enjoying something, start making money from it, start combining all of your interests into career that lasts one, five, ten years....then today is the day you should do it. I've interview Daymond before. We covered a lot of his background and how he started when I interviewed him about his book, "The Power of Broke." But on this interview I learned some new things. 1) DON'T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB. Many people are unhappy in their jobs. I hear it every day from people. I get emails every day about it. But you can't start a business in a second, or a month, or even a year. Daymond worked at Red Lobster for SIX YEARS while he was getting FUBU off the ground. He didn't want to take a chance. Why not? One might ask. It's scary. If you leave a job for a new business and it doesn't work out, how will you pay your bills? I stayed at my job at HBO for 18 months after I started my first business before I would make the leap. I was really scared. You don't leap until you can take away as many of the risks as possible. 2) DON'T DO THE COOL THING While Daymond was working at Red Lobster and selling hats on the street, his friends were losing their lives selling drugs. I was reading recently about Charlie Munger, Buffett's #2 man at Berkshire Hathaway and one of the richest men in the world. He started a hedge fund in 1973. The worst time ever to start a fund. And, if I remember correctly (I refuse to Google), he was down 20-30% the first year. And then 20-30% the second year. And then he fought back and ended up making money for his investors. Another man, probably in a very similar situation, was Bernie Madoff. We don't know exactly what happened but the theory is that when he was down he was too ashamed to tell anyone and turned it into a massive fraud. Character is destiny. The choices you make today are your biography tomorrow. Daymond refused to let the opinions of others veer him off his path. He worked hard, stuck to his uncool job while he pursued his passion. And made it work. 3) COMMUNITY Critical to Daymond's success. Make the company more than just about you. Make it about the community. Then it has a life larger than "Daymond John." You create something people are willing to share. How did he do this? Name - "FUBU" means "for u, by us". BAM! Friends - Daymond got his friends to wear it. Then their friends wanted to wear it. And so on. That's real marketing. Don't even think of advertising your product unless PEOPLE ARE FIRST DYING TO SHARE IT. Authority - LL Cool J grew up down the street from Daymond. Daymond didn't know him but he started pursuing him, asking him to wear a FUBU product in one of his videos. LL probably didn't even know who this kid was. But then he saw other kids wearing the clothes. And he responded to the name. So he started wearing FUBU in his videos. BAM! Shows - Daymond started going to all the Hip hop fashion conventions. The Magic convention in Las... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I heard an eight-year-old kid tell another eight-year-old that he's not welcome in his home. He said "Trump or Clinton?" "Clinton." And that was that. They kept walking. Kept debating and I bet nothing happened. I bet they're still friends. Some people are either all talk or afraid. Or both. I try not to be either. I try to listen, come up with ideas, and be grateful. Because if I listen, I learn. And then I can say two sweet words, "thank you." How many people said, "If Trump becomes president, I'm leaving the country." Or the other way around? There's only one reason why I'd ever even consider packing. And Bobby Casey spelled it out for me. "Americans don't understand how insanely expensive it is to live in the U.S.," Bobby said on my podcast. He sold everything he owned and left the country in 2009. Right after the market crashed. Now he works all over the world. And helps people get off the grid. I wanted to know how he did it. And why... "I hated my customers," he said. "I hated my employees, I hated my job, I hated my business." "But what made you think you could sell all your belonging and travel the world forever?" "Weren't you scared you would run out of money?" "I just knew I'd work it out," he said. "I'd make some money." I couldn't do it. It's easy to be uncertain when you're level of unknown isn't going to erupt your central nervous system. But Bobby had motivation. "My happiness and my quality of life is much more important than cashing out on a business," he said. "I didn't care. I wanted to be happy again." So he got rid of everything. He gave away motorcycles. (He had 27). Then he bought two one-way tickets to Prague. One for him. And one for his 9 year old son. "We'd never been there." The rest of his family moved a few weeks later. He has three kids. "What about friends? And school?" I asked. "My daughter, she's 20, she's a rapper in London. She did two years of virtual school. And she can make friends anywhere. It's her personality type." His other two kids enrolled with locals. I had 100 questions. "How'd you get the confidence? What type of freelance work did you do?" "How did you make ends meet?" He broke it down for me. And told me all the ways he saves money living abroad. "I did the math on this," he said. "You won't believe this, but I pay $42 a year for a 10,000 euro deductible health insurance plan." Anything after 10,000 euros, he's covered. "I could get airlifted to John Hopkins if I wanted and that would be covered." "You can make about $150,000, tax-free, as an American living abroad." Here's how Bobby explains it on the podcast... If you make $100K (gross) in the U.S, then you're probably netting less than $60K. Abroad, you can make the same $60K (net), live tax-free (if you qualify for the "foreign earned income exclusion"), get a housing allowance, pay $42 a year for health insurance, and basically never feel broke again. I was getting depressed. Because I know I'm not going to move. It's part of being human. Everyone I look up to, Scott Adams, Dan Ariely, Nassim Taleb, they all say the same thing: people are irrational creatures. Even the idea that we're being rational, is irrational. Every time Bobby spoke, I had 10 new questions. I thought I'd never understand. But then he gave me his secret. And it answered all my questions. It was so simple. I couldn't believe it. Bobby and his son were walking around Estonia. They left Prague, bought a house and had no plans. Someone overheard them speaking English. "You're American?" They started talking. "What are you planning to do for your kids for school?" Bobby had no idea. "I have a son who's your son's age. We found a really good school up the hill. There's a meeting tonight for foreigners who want to enroll their kids." That was it. Then Bobby told me his secret..."I... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Social media is a bloodbath. Trump. Hilary. Walls. Genitals. Crooked this or Deplorable that. There's two things I know: 1) I choose whether I am happy with a situation or not. Whether I am "free" or not. Nobody else can choose that for me unless I give them permission. If a situation (call it X) happens that I don't like, I ask myself: is the world better with X and me in it. Or with X and "no me". All I can do is have impact on the people around me. And if it's worthwhile impact, if it's the sort of impact that helps people and creates positive change, then those people around me will share it with the people around them. That's how things get done. That's how one "votes" with their life every single day. No excuse. 2) I'm not the smartest person in the room. If a situation happens that I don't understand, I don't pretend to understand it. I don't go ahead and act like I understand it. I have no clue. So I ask the smartest person in the room. I ask the people who know more than me. I ask people I respect who might have opposing views. The world has many opposing views. And I admit that I don't understand all the facts. I ask people who have more facts than me. Who have studied more than me. Do I automatically agree with them? It doesn't matter. They feed my brain. I know they will because I already trust them to think carefully about an issue and I trust their years of experience. Then I think. Then I decide. Does it change what I do? No. I do what I do. I try to keep having impact in the way that I know best. I want to be a free person. This doesn't mean rich. Which often entangles me too much in the addiction of having more and more. Nor does it mean have everyone love me. Because that is also is something outside of me that is out of my control. Freedom means I can make choices. Freedom means I can make as many choices as possible to live the life I want to live. I wanted to learn more about what a Donald Trump presidency might mean. There is so much blood shed trying to force me to have one opinion or the other, I decided to call one of the smartest people I know. Ken Kurson shed some light for me on things that were confusing me. Do I have to agree with everything? No. I am free not to. But I learned. Which is always the best thing I can do. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"We all lived through it. But one fun or interesting realizations I came to in reporting the book was... Can we curse on your podcast?" "Yeah. Anything goes." "... Is just how much shit happened in the world between 1999 and 2015." Chris Smith is the author of The New York Times bestseller, "The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests." He interviewed 144 people, including the host Jon Stewart, Craig Kilborn, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee and so many other people. "You know, Jon Stewart's a guy who had an upper-middle-ish class upbringing in New Jersey, went to William and Mary, came into comedy sideways. He wasn't sure exactly what he was going to do after college." I needed to know how Jon Stewart did it. How he redefined Late Night. How he broke out and rose to the top of comedy. And how he used humor to disrupt it all - mainstream media, mainstream politics, the news. "He would wear the same thing in the office everyday: a pair of work boots, a pair of chinos, the same t-shirt, the same Mets hat. And well, they'd rag on him about being a slob. There was-and not to get cheaply psychological-something Jon was communicating... He was simplifying a lot of the extraneous stuff and getting to work." Here's what I learned from Chris Smith about comedy, change and the combination that changed the world: 1) Ask the right questions Jon showed up every day and asked, "What was in the news? What's funny about it? What's our point of view?" Everyday, I ask, "Who can I help today?" It keeps me open to the day. It gives me a fresh perspective. That's part of reinvention. Always looking. Always starting over. Always asking, "What's missing here?" And then filling that gap. 2) Change the format Jon did a "Bush vs. Bush" segment. First you see a clip of Governor Bush talking about Iraq and saying, "We're not here to nation-build." Then you see Bush as president saying the complete opposite. "We're going to nation-build in Iraq." Jon didn't point out the hypocrisy. He could've. But that wouldn't have been funny. Instead, he played dumb. He pretended he didn't know it was the same person contradicting himself. That's what made it funny. He removed knowledge from the situation. And got the attention of millions. Eventually, making real change. They even had an effect on some big issues. "They made an eight or nine-minute mock detective movie. They took one veteran and tried to trace his paperwork through the Veterans Administration. They kept running into ridiculous roadblocks, but it was also moving. It gave you a sense of how much this guy was going through to get medical care," Chris said. "That ended up shaming the Veterans Administration and changing a lot of those rules and regulations." He also transformed media. "Loosely," Chris says. But, in old media you couldn't find the truth like you can today. It would take weeks of research. Now with the Internet you can search and find anything. And turn it around in 24 hours. Chris talked to Anderson Cooper. He said the mainstream media world was always aware of "The Daily Show." They didn't want to get made fun... "And, inevitably, you did." 3) Ignore the traps "You've got, in many cases, a lot of ambitious, competitive, eccentric people," he said. "You put them in a room and give them a deadline and that can lead to a lot of clashes." But Jon didn't get stuck in the trappings of show business. Which is easy to do in any career. But if you use your idea of how things could be to fuel creation, you get a leg up. You get "The Daily Show." 4) Live in two worlds "What about when you were writing the book? Did you ever wish you were them? Did you ever feel like, 'I'm covering them, but I want to be them'?" I knew my answer. And Chris's answer was more or less the same.... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I wish I was as smart as Steven Johnson. I asked him, "What is your one favorite thing that everybody thinks is bad for you that is actually good for you?" He didn't want to tell me. "My kids might listen to this later," he said. But he told me... He's the author of "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation," "Everything Bad is Good for you," and the recent "Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World"- how the idea of "play" more than anything else, is what created the modern world. "I regret saying this a little, but, the assumption that video games are just a terrible waste of time and that this generation is growing up playing these stupid games is really... it's so wrong," he said. He was talking about using play for education reform. "If you think about it, we walk around with a bunch of assumptions of what a learning experience is supposed to look like: listening to a lecture, watching an educational video, taking an exam to test your learning." I was gonna puke. "I've been watching my kids play Battlefield 1, which is set in WWI. And it's amazing." "I sit and watch my kids play and ask what they're thinking about. Because as a grown up who doesn't play the game you can't process it. There's just so much going on in the world. They're playing this multiplayer game, in this incredibly vivid landscape with a million data points streaming across the screen." His doesn't understand it. And his kids don't understand how he doesn't understand it... "Didn't you see the signal I got? And how this one piece of the interface was telling me to do xy and z?" "All I can see is there's a gun and a Zeplin. I'm 48," he said. We're the same age. "Does that make me middle aged?" "We're old." Kids are basically gonna destroy us. We're the one's who are going to end up in diapers. They started off there, we end up there. Unless... We play, too. So here's what Steven found out. One would ask, that sounds ridiculous: how did "play" create the Industrial Revolution. Or all the wars of the past 500 years. Or all the innovations we've seen with the Internet, which was initially funded by the military. What does "play" have to do with it? Everything. And that's what makes Steven Johnson so infuriating. He'll take two concepts that seem like they have nothing to do with each other and he'll say, THIS caused THAT! And I'd shake my head and cry and ask, "How is that even possible?" And then he'll show me. Because he traces his curiosity. It's like when you start clicking all the hyperlinks in a Wikipedia page. And seeing how everything is connected. Steven connects the dots and puts them in a book for you. If I were to recreate a robotic Steven Johnson (hmmm, actually, maybe he is a robot. Or at least has a Cylon brain or maybe Bradley Cooper's brain from Limitless) I'd have to feed in 10,000 books or so, and this ability to find every possible cross connection between every two ideas mentioned in the books. And then he spits it out in his masterpieces. As I told him in the beginning of the podcast: I enjoy a lot of books. A lot of books are great even. But your books and only a few others are among the only books where I read it and I feel like my IQ is going up. I made up a game in fact, based on his books. Maybe someone should make the card game for this. Here's two random concepts. Tell me how they are connected. Example: The lengthening of shop windows in London in the 1600s and the rise of American slavery in the 1800s. I'm not making this up. One really caused the other. Steven calls it "the hummingbird effect." It's different from the butterfly effect where the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane. That's chance. The hummingbird effect is traceable. "It has to be 2-3 steps removed," he said. "And you have to be really rigorous about when it just doesn't work." You play to find the links. I told him this... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know that game where you flip a card, see the face and turn it back over, then try to find the match? That's the game we're going to play... Write down your values. I told Jairek mine. I had three. Jairek is a life coach. And Tony Robbins is his dad. But that doesn't matter. Because Tony didn't invest in his son's strengths. He invested in weakness. "I didn't really have an understanding of what real hard work was," Jairek said. So in college, Jairek went to Canada and stacked lumber. "You've known me a long time," I said. "What's a weakness I have that you think I can work through?" "I'll tell you how we find those," he said. Step 1: Review your values Jairek said, "Let's do this right now. If I were to ask you what's most important to you in life, what would you say?" "Humans..." That was number one. Connecting with people I care about. "Being an honest person who acts with integrity." "And creativity." So here's the card game... Imagine you have all the cards face down on the carpet. Every card has a match. One shows your values. The other shows your time. You have to match them up to win. Because values = time. People say, "Time is money." No. Time is values. But pretty much everyone struggles with this. I struggle with this. Jairek gave an example but it made me wonder maybe your brain's idea of values is wrong. Maybe your "values" are really your expectations... In my life, misery sinks in when expectations are higher than reality. I don't know. The example Jairek gave was a guy who spent all his time doing business. His values were family and God. So I asked Jairek, "Could your brain be wrong?" Maybe this guy's calendar was right. Maybe he really valued business... I'm not in his head. I don't' have a life coach. I have a therapist. So if you're reading this and thinking, "No he doesn't," then you know what's true for you. Step 2: Find a match Log your time. Look at your day and your week. Jairek's clients log their lives for seven days. But he also needs to know your thoughts. Which is harder to measure. "I don't have a sensor for that yet," he said. "It's subjective." Jairek has helped thousands of people. One client said, "Honestly, I wake up and the first thing through my head is, 'Am I going to close that deal today?' It's always combing through my mind. Even at dinner. I'm thinking about the paperwork. My mind's constantly turning. I'm not able to let go of what's going on.'" His home life was suffering. So Jairek asked, "What's your ritual to turn it off at the end of the day and walk away without having all those thoughts processing in your head?" Most people don't have a ritual. That's the problem. "You need to disassociate from work," he said. "Get it out of your nervous system." So here's the formula: disconnect, then connect. Part A) Disconnect: "Some people go for a walk, other people breathe for 20 minutes. It's different for everybody. You have to figure out the routine." Sometimes I'm emailing about work at midnight. That's how habits start. They creep in when my guard is down, when I'm not connected to anything I love. Part B) Connect Jairek switched his coaching methods a few years ago. He used to coach on performance. Now it's relationships. Because it's the relationships in our lives that increase our performance. "Right now, if you're at work, and you think about your kids, your heart's probably not gushing over them," he said." "No, usually they suck and I'm annoyed at them." I had plans to see them in a few hours. Then Jairek hypnotized me. "What's the most precious and beautiful moment you have with one of your kids?" he said. "Go back way in the distance. Remember one of your earliest moments with them that just lit your heart up. And as a dad made you prouder than you could have ever imagined." He had... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mike Massimino failed his PhD the first time. Failed the astronaut test the first three times. Failed to get the highest evaluation when he walked into space the first time. And almost destroyed the Hubble Telescope on the last attempt the US was going to make to fix it. But he did it. He did it all. Two things I noticed about him. One thing is he kept saying things to me like, "I wasn't the smartest in X but..." He said that about his classmates. He said that about his neighbors. He said this about his fellow co-workers. He said this out in the middle of outer space. 350,000 miles away from home. In my podcast, years later, he was still saying that. He's a liar. He got his PhD from MIT in "robot arms on Mars". He went into space twice. He fixed the Hubble telescope so now we can see images like this: By the way, he failed the astronaut exam because his vision wasn't good enough. He then figured out how to TRAIN HIS EYES TO HAVE BETTER EYESIGHT. I never even heard of that before. He passed his next exam with 20/20 vision. Clearly he was good enough. In fact, he is the best at everything he has ever done. Humility without negativity (negative might be: "I'm not good enough so I will give up.") seems to be key. In other words: Humility With Forward Action. Second, he told me something very interesting. In his lab at MIT there were ten other students. Four of them became astronauts. Do you know how hard it is to become an astronaut? Out of the 1000s of people who used to apply each year, less than 10 would get in. These 1000s who applied were DESPERATE to get in. And they couldn't. And yet FOUR from this one single lab flew into outer space. If he had been hanging out in a bar instead of a robotics lab, I doubt he could say, "Me and 3 of my friends went into space". Life and it's outcomes are contagious. Be where, and with who, you will inherit the greatest possibilities, the greatest encouragement, the greatest knowledge, the greatest joys and friendship These are the viruses you want to infect you. Those are the people and places that will propel you into outer space. And by "outer space", in this one case I am talking metaphorically. Be the person the people around you expect you to be. I learned this from Mike because I was curious and I reached out to him and wanted to ask questions. Learning something from the people you admire is really the point here. If you do it just once a day you'll learn 365 incredible things a year. This will make your life a dream. And then you'll dream of things you never knew existed. . ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the most commonly believed lie. It will make you lose all your money. It'll make you wake up in your 40's or 50's and wonder what you're going to do about retirement. It will make you develop your worst possible habits. For me, it was drinking. And waking up face to floor. I was ugliest when I was unhappy. That's true for everyone. Unless you hide it with plastic surgery and cocaine. The point is I care about myself now. And not a lot of people say that. But it's important. I should care about me more than anyone else... even my daughters. But sometimes I mess up. Sometimes I love them more than me. Even on airplanes, they say, "Put your mask on before assisting others." If you put a mask on your baby before you put a mask on yourself, your baby will never know who you could've been. If I don't put my oxygen mask on first everyday, then my kids, my friends, everyone I meet, won't know who I really am. They won't know me at my best. They'll know me passed out on the floor because I tried starving myself for three days (it was a fast. I was trying to detox my body. Again this goes back to caring about yourself. Molly, Josie, I swear, I had good intentions.) Let me get back to the most commonly believed lie. It's called the sunk cost fallacy. This is when you stick to what you're doing because you already invested your whole life in it. For example, you won't quit your job (the job you hate) because that's what you went to college for or because you've been doing it for 20 years and change is scary. I studied computer science. I went to graduate school for it. But now I do what I love. Because I gave up. I had to give up on life's little stresses and jump head first into an even bigger stress. It took me one step closer to bottom. And one step closer to the lifeboat. I have a friend. She's 52. Or 53, divorced. She has a "low-level" job. Or that's what she says. She thinks her goals are out of reach. She says, "I can't do it." And she believes it. So I asked my friend Susan David, (she's a Ph.D) "How can you help someone like that? How can you help someone struggling with life's circumstances?" But I was asking the wrong question. Because she told me the stress people experience everyday isn't (usually) caused by massive life events. "There's a particular kind of stress that, in psychology, we call allostatic stress," Susan said, "It's the everyday stress." I was interviewing her about her book, "Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life." She gave 50 or 100 tips to do exactly what the subtitle of her book says, "Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life." 1) Accept it "Accept that you aren't where you want to be," Susan said. "Be with those difficult emotions." She said we get stuck in two ways. One is "bottling." The second is "bruting." Bottling is when someone traps emotions inside. They ignore their feelings. Bruting is when someone obsesses about emotions. And try to determine what happened and why... They both cause high levels of anxiety. So I had to stop asking, "Why?" 2) Choose "want-to" goals I have four main values. They're in my daily practice. Values are the things you want to do versus the things you have to do. Because "have to" goals are less likely to be successful. So I asked Susan, "What if you don't know what your values are?" "We often turn around and say, 'How did I get here?' "I was just going on with flow. I was just doing what everyone else told me to do. I went to college. I got a job. I got a house... How did I get her?' This is a really difficult place for people to be" she said. "What's really critical for all of us to realize is values are not some abstract idea. Values are ways of living, ways of being." Figure out your values. Susan says, at the end of the day ask yourself, "What did I... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Kamal was totally lost. His father had died. His job over. His relationship gone. He felt adrift, depressed, broken. He was so lost he wandered the world trying to find his way back. Twenty years later he wrote the novel about what happened - REBIRTH. The novel is about how he discovered for himself the ancient art of the pilgrimage. How to be a wanderer. How to be lost in a world with too much GPS raining down. Would a pilgrimage, a wandering, solve his problems? I read Kamal's book. The book comes out today. I had him on my podcast (also out today). I wanted to find out how even in our daily lives we can go on a pilgrimage. Even if I'm in a cubicle, can I break free, can I become a wanderer Sometimes I also feel stuck. But I don't want to go away for months at a time. I want a pilgrimage in my life right now! From what I can gather from reading the book, REBIRTH, and talking with Kamal, a pilgrimage has several parts: A) SEEKING AN ANSWER Something happened. Something confusing. Something that wasn't in the plan. You have to get off the regular path. Try a new one. Try one that takes a bit of courage and discipline. To meet stranger along the way B) IT TAKES TiME I'm not a believer that you have to go to a far location. But take time for yourself each day to do something you've never done before. Think about things you never thought about before. Find the places in your life that you never looked before. They are there every day. The pilgrimage awaits. Do a dare you never would have dared to before. C) STRUGGLE Maybe some people find life easy. I don't. Life is filled with worries about money, about relationships, about (for me) kids, about decisions, about the people who hate you, who annoy you, who scare you. Anxieties, regrets. Every pilgrimage begins with the struggle. And every journey is a struggle. The struggle doesn't stop. It just changes. It changes into one where you are lost to one where you have vision. Where the struggle is not being trapped in the vision of others but for the unique impact that you want to create. D) BENEFITS OF A PILGRIMAGE: - You see more clearly: Everything you see on a pilgrimage is different from "normal life". Enjoy them. Learn from it. Even a single day, a single meeting, can be a pilgrimage. What is your takeaway from it. - You meet people. I like to pretend everyone has a fortune cookie to give me. A little bit stale, a little bit crunchy, with a folded message inside. Read it. - There's an end. We've made pilgrimages too easy. We can go to a museum and see 2000 works of art. It used to be that people would travel a 1000 miles to see one painting hanging up in a chapel. Then you can really appreciate what you see. The more you appreciate the people, the things, the emotions around you, the more you are a pilgrim. - Come back changed. A pilgrim doesn't just fly a plane from LA to NY. A pilgrim changes because of the journey. You do that by using your senses: listen more, see more, taste more, observe more. The convenience of modern society comes at a price. It's too difficult now to be a pilgrim because everything is two taps away on our phone. There is an "otherness" to being disconnected for a bit. To search. To wander. And finally, to give up looking. To surrender to the results. ---- It's freeing to give up, even for a few minutes, everything you ever knew. To become a Wanderer. To look around and see everything as if it were new. REBIRTH, by Kamal Ravikant, got me thinking about these things. He went on his pilgrimage. He met people. He went on an adventure, a journey, and reading his book showed me how. I need to leave. To struggle. To find an answer. And then to completely give up all hope of ever finding one. To find again the beauty of being completely lost. If I get lost enough, maybe I can find something worth looking for. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"When I was a struggling writer, before I wrote my first book, I got 190 rejection slips." He taped them to the walls like a serial killer. "My wallpaper was rejection slips." "What was the worst one...," I asked Ben Mezrich, a New York Times bestselling author. Over the past five or six years, I've probably read all of his books. He wrote "Bringing Down the House," which became the movie "21". He wrote, "Accidental Billionaires," which became "The Social Network" where Jesse Eisenberg played a seemingly evil Mark Zuckerberg. The New Yorker sent him just a page with the most powerful word known to man. "It was just, 'No,'" Ben said, "I was rejected by a janitor at a publishing house because I sent a manuscript to an editor who was no longer working there and the manuscript ended up in the trash can. A janitor took it out of the trash, read it and sent me a rejection letter." That was his big chance. Not Ben's. The janitor. "I've never wanted to write a book," Ben said. "I wanted to write. I wanted to write a hundred books." I was interviewing him about, "The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway." They found these cows in the 70s. It looked like they were sliced with a laser. They had perfect slices of circles in their abdomens. Like pancakes. And they were completely drained of blood. The FBI investigated. There was no mess. No blood spill. Then pilots started seeing UFOs. Ben says if a pilot sees a UFO now, they'll get fired for reporting it. So I asked him, "Isn't there a freedom of information act?" "They've tried," he said. "But they didn't even admit Area 51 existed until a few years ago. So, no. They don't have to release that information." People lose their minds looking for answers. Questioning can be interrogative or art. Answers birth more questions. And the space between answer A and question B is just space. And that's where Ben's books are created. "I only go into the stories where it's larger than life or something happens," Ben said. "What leads up to that incredible moment? What leads up to Facebook being a billion dollar company or what leads up to a guy suddenly believing in UFOs?" I asked about his writing process. And selling process. "I write by page not by time," he said. If he's writing a 300 page book, he does this: Step 1: introduce characters Step 2: introduce love interest Step 3: introduce what they're trying to achieve / their goal (You're starting off with the obstacles.) That's part 1. Step 4: "At the end of 100 pages something happens -- something that makes it very difficult for the characters to achieve their goal." Ben said, "When I'm interviewing people, I'm thinking of their lives as chapters." Interviewing is part of Ben's writing, but it's also part of his selling process. He won't write a book that won't sell. "How do you know?" I asked. "Usually, I speak to the main character enough to get a book proposal," he said. "Then I do all that research. Then I do an outline (very specific, in fact, I know how many pages each chapter is. It's like a skeleton. It's very severe.)" My dreams don't have skeletons. They usually look like boneless blobs or liquid sliding downstream. Direction over details. That's what Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert told me. I get stuck because I want to do everything at once. I want to read every book, go for a walk, fly around New York City, interview Carly Simon, Edward Thorpe, Carrie Fisher (who I'm sad I missed sharing her stories with you... we were going to meet when she returned from the UK). I want to spend time with my daughters, begin and win at all my dreams, but I also want to do nothing. Sometimes I get so worked up dreaming of the millions of directions I could fly that I forget to take off. But it's ok. Because I have something to write about. I have a connection... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How can you use mass hypnosis to control 60,000,000 people so they vote for you to become the leader of the world? Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, knows the answer and has known it for years. So I called him and asked. I needed to know. He told me how Trump won. And he told me how anyone can use these persuasion techniques to improve their lives. What if you can get people to do whatever you want just by using the right words and subtly hypnotizing everyone you meet? It sounds like a science fiction novel. But it's true. It's what happened, and it happens every day. Who are the victims? You're the victim. Scott Adams predicted in September 2015(!) that Donald Trump would become President because, "he is the best master persuader I have ever seen." Scott Adams trained as a hypnotist and master persuader for years. "Once you realize that everyone is completely irrational," Scott Adams told me, "your life gets a lot easier. "You can start to use the principles behind this to see why people really do things, as opposed to using rational facts, and then use that to your advantage. "Understanding that people are irrational has made my life a lot better." But how did he predict a year and a half ago that Trump would win? I needed to know how. And how I could do it. Trump was the unlikely choice to be President. Just like Scott was the unlikely choice to be one of the world's most popular cartoonists with Dilbert. But we can all learn the skills that Scott learned. Scott heard a story that made him want to change his life in his 20s. His mother had delivered birth to his sister without the use of anesthetics. She was hypnotized. "She felt no pain," Scott said. So Scott, in his 20s, learned all the techniques of hypnosis. "You mean," I said, "You can take a gold watch and swing it in front of their eyes and make them do what you want?" "That has never happened," Scott said, "Except in movies. "What you learn is that basically everything people do is completely irrational. And then they rationalize it later. "Like, they might say they voted for Trump because of his policies but this is just a rationalization. Everyone is irrational and everyone is subject to persuasion." Everything seemed against Trump. But somehow he beat 16 candidates in the primaries and one big candidate in the election. And, Scott says, all the theories as to why he won have been wrong. So I called him up and asked him what happened. And he told me: ----------------- - THE LINGUISTIC KILL SHOT "Trump described everyone using two techniques: - words that had never been used in politics before - words that were visual. So every time you looked at the candidate being described you would look for confirmation bias." Example: Jeb Bush he described as "low energy". "Low energy" had never been used to describe a candidate before so they stood out. And whenever you looked Jeb, unless he was jumping around, you would automatically look for clues that showed he was low energy. Trump systematically did this with everyone who was frontrunner against him, including "Crooked Hillary" which referred both to her legal troubles and the persistent rumors that she was sick. ------------------ - CHARISMA = POWER + EMPATHY Scott said, "Trump clearly had the Power part down. But he was low on Empathy. "So he used polling to figure out what the critical issue was for the most amount of people and came up with Immigration. By going with this issue he proved he had empathy with his base. "Expect him as President to try to show empathy to a much larger group of people." ------------------ - OVERSELLING THE STORY "Trump consistently oversold his point. For instance, 'Build a Wall'." He used hyperbole because it's the direction that counts. "It didn't matter that the facts didn't support him. His base was listening to the direction while all the media was getting bogged down in the weeds. "And... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"When did you decide to go from being a lawyer to a full-time writer?" I asked Gretchen Rubin. She wrote the #1 New York Times bestseller, "The Happiness Project." It was 2001. "At the Supreme Court, I was surrounded by people who loved law. They were reading law on the weekends. They were talking about law at lunch time. They just loved, loved, loved law. And I knew that I didn't." I felt pain in my legs. That's the feeling I had in my body the last time I didn't love something. I couldn't sit around anymore. I got up mid-meeting, walked straight to the elevator and left. "I think a lot of people want to leave what they're doing, but they don't know where to go," Gretchen said. A) How to find where to go "I was looking up at the capitol dome," Gretchen said, "And I thought, 'What am I interested in that everybody in the world is interested in?' That's when she wrote her first book, "Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide." Her first step was research. That's also what she did for fun. "That's a big tip-off," she said. "What do you do for fun?" I loved talking to prostitutes at HBO. But if I stayed I wouldn't have my own podcast. I couldn't talk to anyone I wanted. I was limited to prostitutes. And it wasn't their fault. I didn't know if it was OK to want a better life. I kept waiting for people to notice the signs. I wanted them to worry about me and encourage me to do what I love. But each situation is different. And you can't always ask for advice. Advice is what other people would do if they were you. Not what they actually do as themselves. We try guiding each other with good intentions... but it's not the same as choosing yourself. B) Be you Gretchen has 12 commandments of happiness. And the first one is "Be Gretchen" so for me it'd be, ''Be James." But sometimes I feel really disconnected to myself. Gretchen's suggestions involve knowing a lot about yourself. So I asked her, "What if I don't know anything about myself?" "That is the great question of our lives. 'What does it mean to be you? Who are you?'" "It seems so easy because you hang out with yourself all day," she said. "But it's so easy to get distracted by who you feel you should be... or who you wish you were. Or who other people expect you to be." It's almost like we outsource our personality to everybody around us. But it's OK to stop doing things that should make you feel good, but don't. "I had this weird experience recently," Gretchen said. "I was at a cocktail party. And some woman, very nice person, was saying 'Oh I love going skiing with the whole family. It's a great vacation.'" Gretchen said it seemed great. But skiing doesn't appeal to her. At all. "I love the fact that my husband has a knee injury so I never feel like we have to go skiing." The woman tried convincing her. She said it's a beautiful adventure, great for the whole family and everything else. "Twenty minutes later she came back to me with this absolutely stricken expression on her face. And she said, 'I just realized I don't like skiing either...'" Here's an easy, two-step formula for being happier: Step 1: Do less of what you don't like doing Make a list: 10 things you do but don't like doing. (Unless you don't like lists...) Step 2: Do more of what you like doing Come up with all the things you daydream about. What have you always wanted to try but never had time for? BAM! Now you have time. And you're you. C) Use envy Gretchen was looking through a magazine from her college. She read about the other lawyers. And felt mildly interested. Then she saw people with writing jobs. "I felt sick with envy," she said. "Envy is painful, but it's a very helpful emotion for a happy life. It's a giant red arrow sign standing over someone's head saying, 'They've got something you want.'" I've learned there are three types of self-help books. One is you're telling people what to do. The other is... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dan Ariely was burned all over his body. He lived in the hospital for years. He grew up there. Now he writes about pain. And irrationality. And meaning. He had nerve damage from the burns. And no skin to protect himself from pain. The nurses slowly peeled back his bandages. He begged them to rip them off. They wouldn't. He wanted quick pain and fast relief. They did it slowly for peace of mind. Not his. Theirs. Dan calls this "irrational behavior." He says, "being irrational are the cases where we think we will behave in one way, but we actually don't. And the reason I care about this is because those are the cases in which people are likely to make decisions." He helps predict behavior. So you can respond the way you'd expect you would... not the way you actually do. "It's an interesting conflict," he says. We talked about his new TED book, "Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations." ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Steven Pressfield wrote all of the greatest books for writers. He's a pro. And in part 1 he talks about turning pro. Now he talks about HOW to develop your skills. "I have a writing practice," he says. "And what that sort of means is you detach yourself from the outcome and you're looking at the long picture. If somebody says to me, 'Steve you're gonna live to be 97.8 years old. Are you going to be writing the last day of your life?' I'll say, 'Yes.' And I don't give a shit if it sells or not. I'm in it." Be in it. Because it's not just a habit... it's your life. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

HOW TO GO FROM AMATEUR TO TURNING PRO? I had a full time job. I was trying to run a business on the side. I was pitching two TV shows. And I was obsessively playing chess day and night and traveling to tournaments. And nothing was going well. My attention was scattered. I was unhappy. I felt stuck. One time I was talking to one of the partners in my side business, Randy Weiner. I said to him, "I'm reading this fascinating book about chess endgames". He said, "I don't care about that! Why are you even looking at those books? Chess is a game for kids. You should be working at this business full-time." The next day I quit my job. I joined the business full time. I never played in another chess tournament ever again. I stopped pitching TV shows. I went from being an amateur to being a pro. Which is why I'm glad the other day I spoke to Steven Pressfield, author of "Turning Pro", "The War of Art", "The Legend of Bagger Vance", "Do the Work", and more than a dozen other great books and novels. Sometimes it seemed like each new low was lower. And often the highs were higher. But I haven't had a job since. Ever since I made the decision to turn pro, I've been free. It took me two years of asking before Steven finally agreed to do the podcast. I've read all his books twice. But I was still scared to death right before the podcast. Steven and I spoke for two hours about turning pro, writing, how to improve, how to achieve peak performance in any field of life. I wanted to ask questions nobody else would ask him. Two hours later I feel good about it. The podcast is coming out later today. Here is some of what we spoke about: - HOW TO DEAL WITH THE DEMONS When I join a gym, I go until I stop going. Then it basically teeters off. I'm an amateur at going to the gym. Every single day I write. If I don't do it for two days in a row I feel physically sick. But so many times I feel bad about what I am working on. Or I feel unsure if I should work on the next book. or try the next new idea. The demons come up. I get blocked. I get frustrated or scared. Will I be a failure? Have I run out of ideas? Steven wrote several books about these very demons. Steven said, "those thoughts are 'the Resistance'. "Every time you want to go from a lower level to a higher level - becoming an entrepreneur., get in better shape, meditate, be an artist - the Resistance will ALWAYS attack. Every writer or entrepreneur feels the Resistance every day." Recognize each thought as it comes up, he said. Identify the thoughts that are the resistance. Say, 'that's the resistance". "There's no way to get rid of The Resistance. Be aware of it. Say to yourself, these thoughts won't help me achieve my dreams." - KEEP THE EGO OUT A friend of mine started a company once. It was clearly a bad idea. But he thought it was a homerun. This is a cognitive bias. We tend to believe that if we pour our heart and soul into someone (our personal "investment") then it's a good idea. When I do something I have to constantly stop and ask if I'm smoking my own crack. One time I made a website I thought was brilliant. It had an IQ test on it. And it was a dating site. And it would tell you if you were smart or stupid and you can then date people and know their intelligence. I thought it was brilliant! My six year old daughter told me, "Isn't this kind of mean?" My daughter refused to light my crack pipe. Steven told me he had to make sure with his most recent novel, the autobiographical "The Knowledge" that he had to keep his ego out of it. "I had to put some distance between myself and the writing because it was about my early struggles as a writer." - EVEN A PORN DIRECTOR CAN BE A MENTOR: Steven told me about how he switched from writing bad novels to going into screenwriting, to finally getting back to writing novels. It's important to keep switching around, to pursue every angle of an interest.... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I was very late and I was very upset at myself. I had flown three thousand miles. I moved into an Airbnb right next to where Tim was staying. I had written thousands of notes on ripped pieces of paper and stuck them all throughout the book. I had notes written up and around all the margins. I listened to dozens of his podcasts. And I've known him for years. All morning I had jotted down possible questions. And I was late to meet Tim for our podcast. Because the west coast is three hours a way in time travel from the east coast. That's how stupid I am. I rushed over and he was waiting. Tim follows his own advice. He was relaxed. No problems. I apologized, we spoke for awhile, and then started the podcast. Three hours later...not even close to done but we stopped. I want to be a better person in life. I want to be healthier. I want to be more creative. I want to find what is hidden inside of me, dig around, unleash it. I want to find the strength to do that. It's not an easy to thing to do. To scrape the dirt and dust that collects inside of ourselves. To explore. To wander. To create. Tim's book, "Tools of the Titans" is a guidebook for doing the above. And I had a lot of questions. ---- A few months after I started my podcast in 2014, Tim wrote me and said, "Can I call you and ask you some questions about podcasting". I said sure and he called and we talked for quite awhile. He called many podcasters during this period. Then he started his own podcast. He DOMINATED. All of his guests were amazing. He told me he was getting so much great advice from his guests it was overwhelming. The aftermath of a hailstorm where everything is just glowing and even the air you breathe seems cleansed. But that lasts only a short time until the atmosphere is filled with the everyday pollution of life. So he took a month off, re-listened to all his podcasts, and just for his own use he wrote down the advice he was hearing. "But it was too much," he told me. "I kept writing. It was clearly a book." It's not like any other book he's written. He steps out of the way in many cases, and let's these super-achievers do the talking. He curates their thoughts. They had found the hidden gems inside themselves, and long ago brought them up to share with the world to achieve their successes, and now they documented them with Tim. That's why I flew 3000 miles. I wanted the gems. I wanted answers. ---- I've had so many ups and downs I try to quantify what works on the way up. What goes wrong on the way down. I try to quantify: what are the steps for reinvention? I wonder: what makes someone break out of mediocrity? About seven months ago I threw out all of my belongings. I gave away or donated to the library about 3000 books. All of my books now are on my kindle. None of the answers were in my things. But now I have one physical book. Tim's. And I plan to keep it. Here are ten things (among many) I learned from the book and from our podcast: "ALL I HAVE TO DO IS SHOW UP" I'm impressed how Tim did his work before starting a podcast. Starting something new is not about taking risks. Jumping into the unknown, getting out of the comfort zone, doing something scary. It's not about bravery. It's the exact opposite. You can only do so many "new" things in life. So do the work beforehand. He called people up. He learned the craft as much as he could. He talked to people ranging from me to people at Apple. He had initial guests lined up. He had a huge launch. And he told me the other day that he is persistent at getting his guests. One recent guest, he told me, took two years to book. Which was refreshing for me to hear since it often takes me that long or longer to book many guests. Comedian Whitney Cummings told him: "My work is not done on the night of a big standup special. My work was done three months ago. All I have do is show up." Even though I was late for our podcast,... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I was very late and I was very upset at myself. I had flown three thousand miles. I moved into an Airbnb right next to where Tim was staying. I had written thousands of notes on ripped pieces of paper and stuck them all throughout the book. I had notes written up and around all the margins. I listened to dozens of his podcasts. And I've known him for years. All morning I had jotted down possible questions. And I was late to meet Tim for our podcast. Because the west coast is three hours a way in time travel from the east coast. That's how stupid I am. I rushed over and he was waiting. Tim follows his own advice. He was relaxed. No problems. I apologized, we spoke for awhile, and then started the podcast. Three hours later...not even close to done but we stopped. I want to be a better person in life. I want to be healthier. I want to be more creative. I want to find what is hidden inside of me, dig around, unleash it. I want to find the strength to do that. It's not an easy to thing to do. To scrape the dirt and dust that collects inside of ourselves. To explore. To wander. To create. Tim's book, "Tools of the Titans" is a guidebook for doing the above. And I had a lot of questions. ---- A few months after I started my podcast in 2014, Tim wrote me and said, "Can I call you and ask you some questions about podcasting". I said sure and he called and we talked for quite awhile. He called many podcasters during this period. Then he started his own podcast. He DOMINATED. All of his guests were amazing. He told me he was getting so much great advice from his guests it was overwhelming. The aftermath of a hailstorm where everything is just glowing and even the air you breathe seems cleansed. But that lasts only a short time until the atmosphere is filled with the everyday pollution of life. So he took a month off, re-listened to all his podcasts, and just for his own use he wrote down the advice he was hearing. "But it was too much," he told me. "I kept writing. It was clearly a book." It's not like any other book he's written. He steps out of the way in many cases, and let's these super-achievers do the talking. He curates their thoughts. They had found the hidden gems inside themselves, and long ago brought them up to share with the world to achieve their successes, and now they documented them with Tim. That's why I flew 3000 miles. I wanted the gems. I wanted answers. ---- I've had so many ups and downs I try to quantify what works on the way up. What goes wrong on the way down. I try to quantify: what are the steps for reinvention? I wonder: what makes someone break out of mediocrity? About seven months ago I threw out all of my belongings. I gave away or donated to the library about 3000 books. All of my books now are on my kindle. None of the answers were in my things. But now I have one physical book. Tim's. And I plan to keep it. Here are ten things (among many) I learned from the book and from our podcast: "ALL I HAVE TO DO IS SHOW UP" I'm impressed how Tim did his work before starting a podcast. Starting something new is not about taking risks. Jumping into the unknown, getting out of the comfort zone, doing something scary. It's not about bravery. It's the exact opposite. You can only do so many "new" things in life. So do the work beforehand. He called people up. He learned the craft as much as he could. He talked to people ranging from me to people at Apple. He had initial guests lined up. He had a huge launch. And he told me the other day that he is persistent at getting his guests. One recent guest, he told me, took two years to book. Which was refreshing for me to hear since it often takes me that long or longer to book many guests. Comedian Whitney Cummings told him: "My work is not done on the night of a big standup special. My work was done three months ago. All I have do is show up." Even though I was late for our podcast,... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Explorer's Code: I wanted to wake each morning, not anxious about my day anymore. Not worried about what so-and-so would say, or where my career was going, or what was I going to write today. My only job each day is to explore something new. So I called up Josh and asked him how I could be an explorer. He told me. - Have A Mission Every day, whether it's "be creative today." Or "go some place you've never been" or "talk to ten random strangers", make a mission. Learn something new. Missions are for people who DO. Mission statements are for people who DON'T. -Uncomfortable Situation Try to put yourself in as many uncomfortable situations as possible. "For instance," he said, "you should apply for a temp job. See what it's like." Or maybe one day you and a friend can make a bet: who can get the furthest out of town with just $100. The uncomfortable zone is where you find out who you are, the comfort zone is where you sleep. Task: make a list of uncomfortable situations. Stretch the idea muscle. -Partners/Team Josh has 100s of people who submit items to Atlas Obscura and atlasobscura.com. "There's over 10,000 weird and obscure places on there now." He also started it with two partners. Even superheroes need a team. Superman still needed the Justice League. Luke Skywalker still needed Han Solo and Princess Leia. Luke Cage needs Iron Fist and Jessica Jones. Who are on your team? Are they good people? Do you each have your super power? I am constantly looking for my team of fellow explorers. "Try to experience wonder every day," Josh told me. A few months ago, my mission was to throw out everything I owned. What would it be like after 40 years of collecting things, to own absolutely nothing. And a few months before that, my mission was to track down someone who had disappeared from my life. I failed at that mission. But I experienced wonder along the way. And today, I'm going to change my life forever. I will text you about it. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What does it sound like when you change your mind? That's the name of Seth Godin's next book. He only printed 5,500 copies. And he's not printing anymore. He doesn't just view a book as pages surrounded by two covers. He makes a 3-dimensional object that's beautiful to look at and read. "It's not new," he said on my podcast. "It's the best of the last four years of my work. And it's illustrated with hundreds of photos by Thomas Hawk, who's the most prolific and talented internet photographer." The book weighs 18 pounds. And it's 800 pages long. I asked him about art and marketing... and he told me about life. A) START FROM THE BEGINNING "No business, no project, no novel ever started big," Seth said. It started with fear, uncertainty, excitement, possibility. Tons of "what if's" that lead to real action. And real action halts the what if's. The what if's turn to what is. Seth said, "Instead of saying, 'I need to leap to the middle,' say, 'I'm going to start with people who want to engage with me.'" All successes start with one person. That's it. One person, then two, then three. Success is a curve. We all know it. Don't try to cheat the curve. B) KNOW YOUR WORLD I asked Seth, "How do you know what the world wants to hear?" "Well, first of all," he said, "never the whole world. You pick your world." Where do you hurt? Where you do you feel a knot? Can you loosen it up and ease the pressure? Can you create something for the people who want to love what you want to love? C) WHAT DO YOU CARE ENOUGH TO SAY? We talked about Facebook. And the Lays Potato Chip guy who re-designed the bag. His job was to make it sound crunchier. Kids had slamming competitions. Who could slam a soda the fastest? So Coke-A-Cola created a bottle with a mouthpiece meant to maximize chugging efficiency. They sold product. But it's the message that matters. I always say: message over money. Invention happens at the edges. Between heart and lungs, breath and vocal chords is the message. It's the thing you want to say. The thing you're afraid to say. "What really matters isn't what time you posted on Facebook," Seth said. "What matters is, what did you care enough to say? D) ANYONE CAN LEAD... "'Purple Cow' says, 'How do I sit in my office and make a thing that people talk about?'" "What 'Tribes' says is 'Now that anyone can stand up and lead (because anyone can have a media channel... because anyone can make connection) will you choose to lead? And if you're going to lead, who will you lead? How will you connect the people you're leading? That is marketing, but it's also life." E) CULTURE BEATS EVERYTHING "No one has a Suzuki tattoo," Seth said. "What's a Suzuki tattoo?" I asked. Then I got it. Harley Davidson makes half their revenue licensing their brand. T-shirts, jackets, etc. "If you're in the Harley tribe, you can't show up on a Suzuki," he said. "Tribes aren't about the alpha to the omega. Leaders always go away. The alpha person dies or moves on. But the tribe doesn't. The tribe persists. Because culture beats everything. Scenes have a culture. Tribes have a culture. It's culture that determines how an organization make its choices, how a nation will evolve." I've said this before. It doesn't matter who the president is. What matters is who you surround yourself with. Who's in your tribe? Who's in your heart? And if they're toxic to your creativity or well-being, detox now. "The Beatles didn't invent teenagers. I'm not saying we invent our tribe. We just show up to lead them." I didn't invent the choose yourself community. The cubicle job did. I'll never say what other people should do. I just say what I like to do. I say what gets me past just getting by. F) SHOW UP "Half my blog posts are below average," Seth said. I asked if he feels bad. Intellectually, I understand failure. But it still hurts. It can turn your life upside down. I lost everything more... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brian Koppelman and his wife Amy Koppelman saved my life. Many years after he ruined my life. First off: when he wrote the movie "Rounders" I became obsessed with poker. I went to the same club he played at and played for 365 nights, including the night my first daughter was born (I was there for the birth though!) . I was an addict. But eventually I stopped in order to start another company. I wish I had never stopped because that other company cost me all of my money at the time. Then he wrote several of my favorite movies after that. I didn't even know it was the same director until the first time I interviewed him here. Now he is writing and producing my favorite TV show, "Billions" on Showtime. About an aggressive hedge fund billionaire going after an equally aggressive US Attorney played by Paul Giamatti. Brian has been on the podcast several times but there's always so much more to talk about in terms of creativity and inspiration and how to succeed as an artist / entrepreneur. Ditto for his wife Amy who has also been on this podcast and written three of my favorite novels. One of which was turned into a movie ("I Smile Back") starring Sarah Silverman. But here is how they saved my life. Awhile back I had a personal emergency. Things were going haywire. Amy called me and said, "What's going on?" I told her. She had me take a photo of every meal I was eating ("I want to make sure you are eating") and a photo of everyone I was eating with ("I want to make sure you are around people") and had me write to her every day what was going on in my head ("write!") That was one time. Another time: I lost millions of dollars in a half hour while I was on the set of "Billions" watching it be filmed. I was called into an emergency board meeting by phone and found out the company was going to be shut down. It was a disaster. But 90% of how we feel about a situation is determined by our choice of how we will react. Only 10% is based on the situation itself. And since I was on the set of my favorite TV show being filmed, I decided to enjoy myself. Brian later said to me, "You lost what!? We couldn't tell at all. You were making jokes, asking questions, and you were the last one to leave." I used being on the set of "Billions" to change my reaction to an otherwise horrible event. This allowed me to easily change my 90% reaction into a positive one. So not only is Brian a creative genius, but he's a good friend. I went up to his offices where they are writing season 2 of "Billions" and I had maybe 1,000 more questions about creativity, writing, the arc of his career, and of course, billions of dollars. But one thing stands out for me. Everyone always says, as if it were advice that has come down from heaven to all writers: "Write what you know". Brian doesn't agree with this. And this is the secret to his success. And the secret to all the great writers in history. Stephen King didn't know what it was like to be a bullied teenage girl with psychic powers when he wrote "Carrie". Ernest Hemingway didn't know what it was like to be an old Cuban man who spent his life fishing. JK Rowling didn't know what it would be like to be a boy attending Hogwarts Wizardry School. Brian Koppelman told me: "Don't write what you know, write what fascinates you." This is the key to all good art. In this podcast, we also talk about what it feels like to hit a dead-end. To be unsure how to move forward. To be scared that maybe the best was behind us. How do you move past that. Recreate yourself. Start the work again. Flourish. I ask. Brian delivers. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.