The James Altucher Show

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.

WHAT I CAN LEARN IN ONE MINUTE THAT WILL CHANGE MY LIFE FOREVER Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) has a new podcast and it just hit #1 in the iTunes charts. "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" is the name of it and it's about to change my life. He came over to play backgammon and I asked him about it. He told me he became a journalist because it was an easy way to start talking to people. He said, "If I ask people to tell me something I don't know," then I often learn new things and it keeps the conversation going. My mind blew open. I'm tired of freezing up. Feeling too paralyzed to talk. I'm a shy introvert. This will help unfreeze me. For everyone I meet, I will try to learn something I don't know. I'll simply ask them. This will be my new habit. --- I listened to Dubner's first podcast of the new show. I learned something new from one member of the audience. First off, it's a hard podcast to create. Listen to it. There are three panelists. There's a fact-checker. And there's 100 people in the audience. I've never heard of a podcast like that. It's crazy to put that much work into a podcast! To be creative, go beyond what everyone else says is crazy. And to be crazy, go beyond what everyone else says is creative. Creativity is a lose-lose proposition. You're crazy and you're lost in the woods. But if you aren't creative, you're stuck in traffic with everyone else. Someone on the show said something I didn't know: when you sleep, the nerve cells in your brain constrict, allowing spinal fluids to wash right through and clean up the proteins that often attach to nerve cells in the brain to cause Alzheimers. I learned about five new things on that very first episode. I went to sleep that night in anticipation. Spinal fluids washing through my brain, giving my cells a much needed bath. --- If I can ask everyone, "Tell me something I don't know," I'm going to learn from everyone. It adds up. It compounds. It will give me more knowledge and help me be less shy. I hope. "Tell me something I don't know". ------------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.

He died. He was giving a speech, sat down, and the next thing... he was dead. They called an ambulance. They got paramedics. They did that thing. They brought him back to life. But his body didn't like living. He died again. Eight more times they used machines to convince the machine in his body that we call a heart, to come back to life. Please come back to life, the machines said to his heart. And finally his heart decided to stay. After that, things changed. Like they often do when we die at the age of 47. "There are three things," Chip Conley, now the head of hospitality for AirBnB, told me, "a job, a career, and a calling." "I had been building and running hotels for 20 years. It was my calling to be in the hospitality business. I built over 50 hotels. But it was starting to feel like a job." "When I died, I realized I couldn't do it anymore. I had to go back to my calling." Within a few years he had sold his business. He had nothing left to do. "I had faith in my calling, though," Chip said. "Something would happen." And it did. It did. Adam wrote me. He was my Airbnb host. I've been in 4 different Airbnbs that Adam owns over the past three years. So we knew each other. I only live in Airbnbs and I know many of the regular hosts in New York City. "I'm having a special guest in the apartment right downstairs from you," Adam wrote me. "He's the head of all hospitality for Airbnb. Would you like to meet?' Yes, very much so. I had spent 90% of my life in Airbnbs over the prior three years and just about 100% in the prior year. In 2014 I even wrote an article, "10 Ways to Improve Airbnb." Adam made the introduction. Chip Conley, the man who had died a few years earlier and sold his hotel business, responded. "Should I bring a bottle of wine?" he said. He came upstairs and we started to talk. "Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, called me and asked me if I wanted to be the head of hospitality. Airbnb was a tech company, it wasn't used to being a hospitality company." "When I ran 50 hotels, hospitality was my main focus." "For each hotel, I had the hotel managers come up with five adjectives for what that hotel would be." "Maybe the adjectives might be: funky, hip, modern, clean, rock & roll." "Every employee, even the housekeepers, would keep those adjectives in mind in whatever they did. And, if possible, we even made sure the five senses the customers would experience in the hotels would match the five adjectives." "This is a great idea," I said, "You can even apply ideas like this to writing a book. Or even building a career for yourself. What five adjectives do you want your life, or the objects you create, or your relationships, be used to describe it." "Absolutely," Chip said. So he went to Airbnb to start creating an atmosphere of hospitality among the hosts. He had found his way back to his life's calling. I had felt it. Since 2013, Now I live in them. Now they are home. All because Chip died. "How do you find your life's calling?" I asked him. "What did you love doing when you were 6, 8, 10 years old," he said. "Like I had one friend who even at 6 was making mudpies as if they were real pies. Then she became a lawyer but was always unhappy." "So she quit being a lawyer and is now one of the biggest pastry chefs in the world." "For me, I was always pretending to run a restaurant in my house. I always wanted to be in the hospitality business." I thought back to when I was ten years old. I was writing short stories. And when I was 12 I even wrote an article in the newspaper interviewing politicians. You find your interests from back then and see how they age into the current day. "Find the thing you did where you lost all sense of time while you are doing it," Chip told me. "Remember the equation from Victor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning'," he said. "Despair = Suffering - Meaning." "Find the things that bring you meaning.... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

http://ryanholiday.net/dear-dad-dont-vote-donald-trump/ ------------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.

JOKE Last night I wrote down six things I wanted to do today. I kept number six blank. "JOKE" was just a reminder to start this post with a joke from Jon Macks... "If you live in Florida, ya know, God's waiting room..." "If you're Jewish, like me..." Those are just a few lines from my interview with Jon Macks. He was the top writer for "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno. He wrote 100 jokes a day. That's half a million in 20 years. He's written jokes for President Obama, Bill Clinton, John Kerry and monologues for Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock... and wrote the book "Monogluge: What Makes America Laugh Before Bed." But before comedy, Jon did political consulting. "I realized I could do one thing 300 nights a year: politics or perform. And I chose politics." He somehow transitioned and reached the heights of a dream career in comedy. I wanted to know his secret. I also wanted to know how to be funny... 1. Association Joke: I asked Jon how to run for Congress. "Anti-Washington, anti-establishment is what's working right now," he said. I'm not running for Congress. But, the night of this interview, I went to an open mic. So I ran some headlines by Jon. And he wrote jokes on the spot. Headline: "Trump Refuses To Say He'll Accept Election Results" Jon: "The Toronto Blue Jays lost yesterday. They're refusing to accept the fact that the Cleveland Indians are going to the world series." This is an association joke. You look at what else is happening. Then marry the two. 2. Rule of 3's: This is Billy Crystals joke: "Donald Trump reminds me a lot of hurricane season. He starts out with a lot of hot air, spins out of control, by the first week of November he's completely gone." The rule of 3's is this: Set up your joke. Start with a fact or an idea. Then expand on the idea by listing three qualities. The third is usually unexpected. That's your punchline. 3. Look for the oddity Jon said, "Most normal people-and I put comics as 'not normal'-most normal people walk into a room and go, 'This looks like a great party.'" But a comic asks questions. "Who shouldn't be here?" "Why are they serving bacon cheeseburgers at a Jewish event?" Go beyond business as usual. Look for the oddity... in contracts, your conversations, your habits. Try to find the light in life's eccentricities. Or the bull... in shit. 4. Find "your kind of people" and bring them together Every day, I practice what I call "emotional health." I spend time with people who lift me up. And I try to lift them up, too. Not with words. But with interests. We hold space for each other. And leave room for the juice in our brain to squeeze out. It's a different kind of lemonade, but it's ours. And we like it. That's all that matters. Seinfeld calls comedians "his type of people." As if they have different brains than everyone else. So I asked Jon, "What is it? What is the comedian?" He said, "A comic will go on stage and either say something we haven't thought of, or something we all thought of in a way that is really unique, funny and brings us all together." 5. Move forward Jon was traveling about 250 nights a year doing campaigns. His third kid was just born. And he had a choice: be a dad or "be someone calling in once a week." Lots of people make this choice. Money is involved. Fulfillment is a factor. The stress of making the "right" versus the "wrong" decision. Jon went with his gut. "I figured I'd take a break from political consulting, and I never went back." He had a 13-week contract with Jay Leno. That turned into a lifetime... Before podcasting and writing, I worked on Wall Street. When everything crashed, I fed people chocolate. I wanted to bring people together. Maybe that's number six. ------------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... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I can't tell you the secret to selling half a million books. Or half a million anything... Every day, business changes, the world shifts on its axis and your skin peels off a little bit. New cells are generated and with each blink, your eyes are rehydrated. "I'll admit, if there was some formula, I'd do it again," he said. Without new experiences, your soul rots. And your book or product or whatever you're trying to get rich quick off of smells like garbage. But people will buy garbage. Because we want new experiences. Ask any child. They'll give you an honest answer of why they like coloring or skipping rope. "I don't know... It's fun?" People wonder what they love. Instead of loving to wonder. Chuck Klosterman grew up in a town of 500 people. He became the number one literary critique of pop culture... before the Internet. Now anyone can research anything. And you don't have to own the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or wait for the library to be open. A lot of people I've interviewed say there's a big luck factor to success... "But I don't think that's as true with you," I told Chuck. He doesn't believe in luck. "The biggest factor is chance," he said. "What's the difference between chance and luck?" Luck: "Luck almost implies like a leprechaun is, sort of somebody is making this happen." "In many ways, it seems like certain people are luckier than others," he said. "I think what that really means is that when they were given chances, they elected to pursue them, as opposed to step away from them. And that kind of creates the illusion of luck." Luck is an open door. Chance is the willingness to step through. When I feel stuck, I don't create a new business overnight. I begin with a pen and a waiter's pad. I carve out a new perspective. I write 10 ideas. Whether the ideas are good doesn't matter. Reinvention, freedom and success are the results of movements. Not the "right movements." Just movements. Unattached, meaningless movements that hopefully fill your day and fuel your heart. "Everything I've liked, I liked in totality," Chuck said. "I wanted to almost be inside of it." Focus on nothing. Or everything. Let life reveal itself to you. Then you won't need luck. Because you'll have something much more valuable: perspective. Skill: When he started, Chuck needed motivation to write. Now he's a dad. And he writes every day. "I make myself do it," he said. His first job was with the local newspaper in Fargo. He wrote a 16-page insert called "Rage," meant to address Generation X. "At the time, my hope was that, maybe, if I do a good job as a reporter and I put in the time, I'd be able to publish a book, or maybe two books in my 50s or something." He thought he'd work as a reporter who might have the ability or the luck or the chance... Chance: "There were 23 kids in my graduating class. I remember the teacher would ask questions. And nobody would say anything," Chuck said.But he knew the answers. He thought everyone knew. "I just assumed everyone growing up felt this way-everybody felt very singular and alone. You had this world inside your mind. And there was the world outside of yourself where you just kind of goofed around, talked to people, and made small talk, but in your mind you had your own kind of world." Then Chuck went to college. "I was amazed to find a handful of people who were just like me, who listened to Mötley Crüe but also wanted to talk about it, and didn't just want to say, 'It rocked.'" Connection changes your mental identity from alone to alive. Chuck's second book, "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" sold half a million copies-more than his other eight books combined. "The only perspective I have is my own," Chuck said. "There is the conscious experience, then there is the unconscious experience. Some of those merge when I'm writing." Mystery... Chuck's latest book asks a hypothetical question that no one will know the... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"I know you've made tens of millions of dollars in various areas of life," I said. "Tell me how you did it." "Hmm." He scanned his memory for money. And landed in 1969. "I put all my possessions in the back of my Mustang and drove to Washington, D.C. I figured if I got $5,000, I could hitchhike my way through South America... but more importantly, Africa." There are about 220 countries on the planet. Doug Casey has been to 160. "I believe in the Latin phrase, 'Mens sana in corpore sano.'" "Sound mind, sound body..." "It means you actually have to go out and do this crap. You have to do it." "Why?" "Because maybe you'll find out the meaning of life." A) Don't be a plant "Unfortunately, most people are born in one place and then live in or near that place for the rest of their lives acting like plants, but I don't think acting like a plant is a good survival strategy for a human." B) Create your own currency Everybody says the Federal Reserve printed money. And devalued the dollar. Everybody's wrong. I asked Doug, "What do people mean when they say the Federal Reserve printed money? I think there's a common misconception around this." His answer: they buy assets and credit back the banks. They don't physically print money. And they don't create value. Doug goes places, meets people, asks them to do things either with him or for him. He values the people he's met, the money he's made/lost and the lessons he's learned. Honor your experiences. Money isn't the currency of life. Living is the currency of life. C) Where do good ideas come from? They say you need to see/hear something at least seven times to remember it. I don't know who said that. I wish I could say it was Ogilvy. I've talked about idea sex 100 times. Here's 101. Good ideas are like babies. Each one is new to the world. (Unless we're living in "The Matrix"... skip to [23:00] for this part of the interview... Even Elon Musk has thought about the likelihood of "reality" actually being "base reality." The chances are "one in billions," he said.) But for now, human babies come from human sex. Sex = creation. And it's the same for ideas. Take two ideas. Combine them. Now you have a new idea. Repeat. This is idea sex. "I wanted to be a paleontologist," Doug said. "Why? Dinosaurs! Every kid likes dinosaurs... But I took it seriously. So, geology background... Then I got interested in money. Put geology and money together and you've got the mining business-which is actually a better way to lose money than to make money-but the good news about the mining business is that they're the most volatile stocks in the world. And still are..." D) Read science fiction "It's a much better predictor of the future than any of the think tanks." E) Try new things I'm writing a children's book. Doug's hobby is nothing I've ever heard of before. He tried taking over a country. "Oh yeah," he said... as if he forgot. "How did I get started in that? Oh yeah, I know what it was." Doug has had 50 lives. He's dined with presidents, made millions, gone broke, wrote books, traveled to war zones, scuba-dived, practiced martial arts, he owns his own research company. And more. But the strange part is he seems to string them all along. Instead of switching from experience to experience, he piles them together. It's not clean. It's not organized. It's human. ------------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... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"Terrorists have moms," he said. Jeffrey Schilling was kidnapped in the Philippines and held hostage for 7 and a half months. The terrorists said they were torturing him. But Chris Voss didn't fall for it. Chris is a former FBI hostage negotiator and the author of, "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It." "Find a way to mention his mother's concern for him," Chris' boss said. "I remember thinking, 'That's the dumbest idea I ever heard. A terrorist is going to care about this guys mother?'" "But my boss had great insight. And I didn't see any downside to it. So in the middle of the negotiation I said, 'Ya know Jeff's mom is really worried about him.'" "What happened next?" I asked. "This murderous, sociopathic terrorist said, 'His mother knows about this? You tell his mother he's OK.'" Months later, Jeffrey came home. Some hostage negotiation tactics won't work in business or with your wife. But these 5 tactics will... 1. Use the "hand-cuff method": Use this line when someone yells at you: "I can't hear you when you're yelling at me." The logic simple. People yell when they want you to listen. But if you eliminate their reward (being heard), then they have to comply. And you'll never get yelled at again. 2. Push past threats: "People who make threats always leave themselves an out," Chris said. But the truth is they need you. If you're not talking, there's no deal. They could lose out on a sale, a new employee, or millions of dollars. "The point of a negotiation is to find out how much money is on the table," Chris said. "You have to push the other side as far as they'll go... without insulting them." 3. Gain the upper hand 100% of the time: "You can gain the upper hand by giving respect first," Chris said. Which a lot of people are afraid to do... "But that's exactly why you gain the upper hand," Chris said. 4. Become less busy: Rest is the new hustle. "Anytime you slow down to do things more deliberately, you save time." Chris calls this, "The delay that saves time." 5. Show fearlessness Fear can be useful. But not in a negotiation. "Showing fearlessness is a great way to inspire confidence in you from the other side," Chris said. Forget what you have to lose. And focus on the reward. I can't afford to lose all my money again. So if you're on this list... don't listen to this interview: A) you're related to me B) you work with me C) you want to sell me something Everybody else is welcome. The negotiation tactic used against Mark Cuban [49:36] Find out the negotiation tactic I use personally [42:08] How to avoid the most dangerous negotiation [4:58] ------------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.

Jewel was broke and homeless, but she still turned down a million dollar check when she was 19 years old. Jewel was broke and millions in debt after selling 30,000,000 albums, and built back from scratch when she was 30. Jewel has switched genres, written music from folk to pop to country to even children's music. She wrote a children's book. I love Jewel. Abused from the ages of 5 to 15. Moved out of the cold barn she was living in at 15 to live on her own. And three years later she was homeless. "I didn't want to be a statistic," she told me she was afraid when she was 15. "I looked around at other girls who were in my circumstances and things went from bad to worse" And yet... she ended up a statistic. She realized this when she was 18, living out of a car, and attempting to stuff a dress down her pants in a store so she could steal it. When I was 18 I feel I was privileged. I had no real worries. I was "suburban lucky". Luck ruined me and made me complacent. I never would have made the good decisions Jewel ended up making. That's why I love her. That's why I'm glad she came on my podcast. I'm sure she's done 100s of interviews to promote her new book, "Never Broken", an excellent book. But I wanted to break her down. I wanted her to laugh. She was so smart and serious. Trust me: I got her to laugh. A) HARD WOOD GROWS SLOWLY Why did a homeless girl who sang for pennies in a cafe turn down a million dollar offer? "Hard wood grows slowly," she said. "I saw that as a kid. The soft trees would break. The hard trees would grow and live forever." She said: I knew I wanted to grow for a long time in this business. I also knew we were still in the grunge era and I was not grunge. If I took a million dollar deal, I read that I would have to pay it back. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to and I would be dropped by the label and that would be the end of my career. In fact, my album didn't do well the first year. But then went on to sell over 10,000,000 copies. They didn't drop me because I was just that girl they paid twelve dollars for. You have to think long-term instead of short-term always. -- She was 19. I do NOT think I would have made that decision. I think I would have made the wrong decisions. How does one take such a long term view at such a young age. I think it was the ten years she had spent developing her skills, singing in bars all over Alaska, preparing for this moment. Confidence is really difficult to develop. I don't know if I have it even now. But I'm going to remember this lesson on the next business decision I have to make. B) REINVENTION IS NON-STOP Jewel has written children's books, gone from folk music to pop to children's to country. She's been a rancher. She's been homeless. I asked her, "You had the benefit of really cultivating your talent from ages 5 to 15. You sang with your dad at gigs every week. "Do you think someone starting from scratch at 50 can do this?" "Absolutely," she said, "Reinvention never ends. It's every day. Pursue what you enjoy and move towards it and there will be opportunities." I look at my own life today. I'm about to finish a children's book. I'm looking into TV. I'm working on a novel. I have other business things. I don't know if any of them will work. But I know if I don't keep trying I will slip back into whatever hole I constantly have to dig myself out of. There are two days to start something new. When you are five years old. And today. C) CREATE ART FOR YOURSELF I said these words: "So when you were talking to Neil Young..." What funny words to say to someone, I thought at the time and told her. Neil Young told her: don't ever write for radio! Meaning: don't write for the masses, write for yourself. I asked her, "isn't there a tension there? Like what if you write for yourself and then nobody likes it? Don't you want to write something that people like?" She said, "We all have... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You're either horrible or miserable. Woody Allen has this joke in "Annie Hall." He says, "Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are terminal cases. You know? And blind people, crippled... I don't know how they get through life... It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable. Because that's very lucky... to be miserable." I guess I'm one of the lucky ones. We complain about getting older or not having a passion, etc. "In relatively recent history-we're talking the 1980s and later-we got convinced into believing we all have a capital P 'Passion,'" Cal Newport said. Cal's a tenured professor at Georgetown. And majored in computer science. So did I. Fact: You can't pre-test a fetus to see what its passion will be. Passion is not in your DNA. I wasn't born to podcast. Or write. Or be a father. I was just born... And I have eyes. So I see what other people are doing. I have ears. So I hear who's winning. And then my brain asks, "Why am I here?" "People believe if we look inside ourselves and discover what our passion is, we'll be happy. I studied this question in the book and that's not how it happens," Cal said. "Passion comes later." First you have to "become so good you can't be ignored..." 1. Start with an interest Steve Martin reinvented stand-up. He told jokes without punchlines. And let the tension linger. He didn't start with a passion for comedy. You start with an interest. I never thought, "Interviewing prostitutes at 3 a.m. is my passion." But I got good at it. I was curious. And I'm still asking questions today. 2. Build career capital Cal did a study. He found a database developer who became too good to be ignored. And used that as leverage. "She got into the computer industry with no background. At every stage, she said, 'What would be valuable here?'" Now she spends 4-6 months working in her cubicle job. And the other 4-6 months in Thailand. Acquire career capital. And leverage it. This is how you get autonomy in the workplace. "It's what lets you get a sense of mastery," Cal said. "It's what makes you get a sense of impact, and this is where passion actually comes from." 3. Focus on rare and valuable skills The first food truck was a pretzel stand. It had wheels and food. Now Michelin-star chefs have food trucks and pop-up shops. They didn't learn how to make pretzels. Or follow the trend. They used rare and valuable skills to innovate the market. I built websites in the '90s. That was my first company. But as soon as I heard my eighth-grade sister was learning coding in school, I sold the company. Coding was no longer rare and valuable. And competition was about to explode. Control competition and you'll control the market. 4. Get to the cutting edge of an industry Mastery leads to passion, not the other way around. You weren't "born" to invent the next iPhone. Nobody was. Even the people inventing the next iPhone weren't born to invent the next iPhone. "Innovations don't come at the very start of your journey." You have to get to the cutting edge, learn what's missing, identify room for growth and innovate. 5. Do deep work Deep work is the process of becoming great. "It requires hard, hard focus and pushes your skill to its limit." It's what you do to become the best in your field. And discover holes in your organization. Or in the planet. It's how you create ride-sharing, social networking, Google maps underwater. Cal says how at [16:04] 6. Or don't... I asked Cal, "Do you think most people actually want to be really good at something... Or do most people just want more time off to just do nothing?" I don't set goals. Or evaluate my growth. If I can support the growth of other people, cheer them on, smile and say, "Congratulations on getting up today," then the window gets bigger. Maybe success isn't... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If I can tell my children to read one post of mine, it would be this post. Influence is how they will navigate a world of uncertainty. Robert Cialdini is the most influential person in the world. And by that I mean, he wrote the book, "INFLUENCE", which sold 3 million copies and defines the six critical aspects of all influence. Now he has a new book, "Pre-Suasion", going 10x deeper into the concepts of persuasion. I got him on my podcast so I can ask the 1000 questions I have. Small story from the book: If you name a restaurant "Studio 97" instead of "Studio 17" people are more likely to tip higher. If you ask a girl for her phone number outside a flower store (triggering feelings of romance), she is more likely to give it to you than if you ask her outside a motorcycle store. And 500 other stories. The environment is just as important as what you say. Before the podcast began, I gave him a book as a gift: "The Anxiety of Influence", a history of poetry. What would poetry have to do with influence and marketing? In all art, since the beginning of time, artists have built on the work of the artists the generation before them. Beethoven depended on a Mozart to be a Beethoven. Picasso depended on a Cezanne. Without Michelson, there would be no Einstein. But poets, for some reason, would deny being influenced. "I never even read Ezra Pound," shouted one poet at a critic. Poets want to be seen as original. NOBODY is 100% original. This is the anxiety of influence. Almost all of our decisions and even creativity are outsourced to the people around us who influence us: peers, teachers, religion, parents, bosses, etc. Our personality is our own particular mishmash of influences. How we deal with that anxiety, how we RECOGNIZE the influences, learn from them, build from them, is the BIRTH of all of our creativity. Let me summarize the seven aspects of influence: - RECIPROCITY - if you give someone a Christmas card they will want to return the favor - LIKABILITY - make yourself trustworthy. For instance, outline the negatives of dealing with you. - CONSISTENCY - ask someone for a favor. Now they will say to themselves, "I am the type of person who does James a favor". - SOCIAL PROOF - if you are trying to get someone to do X, show them that "a lot of your peers do X". For instance, if you are at a bar and you are a guy trying to meet women, being your women friends and not your guy friends with you. - AUTHORITY - "four out of five dentists say.." - SCARCITY - "only 100 iPhones left at this store!" - UNITY - you and I are the same because: location / values / religion / etc I've used each of the above in business. They work. They will make you money. The entire purpose of language is to influence. We are not strong animals. We are weak. The language of influence saved us. Probably a word like, "Run!" was the first word spoken. A word of influence. And it worked. I'm still running from the things I fear. So speak to influence. Don't speak to call a flower yellow. Speak to breathe spirit into an idea, to be enthusiastic, to convey emotion, to influence. This is the only way to have impact with your unique creativity. I gave Robert the book as a gift ("reciprocity"), assuming we would have a great podcast. And we did. But then I thought later, I can't even remember how Robert got on my podcast. I highly recommended his book in the podcast and even in this post. As he got into his car after the podcast in order to go to his next interview, I started thinking, "Hmmm, who influenced who?" ------------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... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I had to stop trying to get ahead. There are 8 million people in New York City. And 7 billion in the world. That's 875 New York Cities. You can't get ahead. Information is compounding. Technology is growing exponentially. Nothing is predictable-except maybe your expectations. But not your success. I used to complain. Now I pivot. "There is no try," Yoda says. Hans Solo didn't believe he could use the force. Trying is just a form of doubt. "Do or do not," he said. When I was 23, I tried figuring out how long it would take me to make a million dollars. I just bought computer. It was the first thing I bought with "hard-earned money." Fast forward 25 years and I've thrown all my stuff away. And I've stopped trying to get ahead. I want an F in effort. And an A in not giving a shit. I'm writing because I'm writing. Not because I'm trying to write. People make this mistake all the time. If you say, "James, what can I do to help you?" you're doing two things right and one thing horribly wrong. Right: you're good-intentioned (maybe) and you're not hurting anyone (again, maybe). But here's where you're wrong... And I've done this before too. I've tried to be a good boss, a good employee, a good investor, but for all the wrong reasons. There's only one good reason: you want to provide value. If you don't want to add value, you're not helping. You're hurting. Growing up, when my family argued, I'd ask, "Can I say something?" "Will it help?" my father would say. I didn't answer. Offering ideas is not valuable. You have to give the "how." Say what you're going to do and list the steps. That's where your idea list comes in. I've started and ran more than 20 businesses. And I can tell you one thing for sure: when I did it for money, I failed 100% of the time. Here's the test... before you do anything, ask yourself this one question: "Do I want to add value?" -- "That's how I got Mark Cuban to come on my podcast," I said. Jenny Blake started a podcast. She came on my show to ask what works. And what doesn't. It would be brilliant strategy... Except it's not a strategy. It's genuine. And that's why it works. She asked to interview me and provide value to you. Jenny's an ex-Googler. I wrote a blurb for her book. So did Cal Newport, Seth Godin, and a few other people I owe return emails to. I wrote, "To pivot well is the difference between millions and failure. Former Googler and entrepreneur Jenny Blake (one of my favorite human beings) dissects the pivot, how to do it, and how to do it right." I can't tell you the right way to pivot. I'll leave that to Jenny. I went on her podcast as a guest host. And she came on mine to dissect my brain. Reorganize it, and give you all the milk. Listen now to learn how I make money, keep it and grow it [12:39], how I got Mark Cuban on the podcast [41:48] and more... - the exact steps I'm taking to pivot in my career right now [6:09] - if and when it's the right time to pivot [8:29] - How I currently make money and diversify my portfolio [13:53] - How to do what you love everyday [16:16] - The 9 experiments I did before creating a stockpickr.com, which sold for $10 million [19:50] -The best and worst way to network [38:38] - What my day-to-day looks like [47:39] ------------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... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

By the time you finish reading this, everything I'm about to tell you will already be over. What you choose to do with it is up to you. Caleb Carr was beaten as a child. His father, Lucien Carr, was an Ivy League boy, friends with Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. They were the rebels of society. Known as The Beat Generation. But Caleb reminded me of their other legacy... "My father gets arrested for murder. Jack gets arrested for accessory because he helped hide the weapon..." "And then Burroughs, of course, shoots his wife down in Mexico." "My father's murder case gave their movement a type of darkness and gravitas it wouldn't have otherwise had." --- "All of these cycles, all of these abusive things are cyclical," Caleb said. His father didn't get the help he needed. He didn't get the help he needed. "It's one of the reasons I never had children myself." I didn't understand at first. Caleb has the awareness. He understands the cycle. So I asked, "Don't you think if you had children, you would have been able to hold yourself back?" "I simply could not trust that," he said. --- As adults, we look at our lives and question what happened and why? We pick at our scabs and then wonder why we're bleeding. What's done is done. And how you choose to live with it is your legacy. So Caleb writes. And between the intersection of abuse and history, he found relief. Caleb's latest book, "Survivor, New York" begins with "The Curse of Knowledge," It's the idea that once you know something you can't unknow it... pain, loss, grief. No pain heals without air. Eventually, the bandaid gets soggy. And the cut below turns green. That's when I start reading. Caleb's books are the air. Keep reading to learn three lessons from the brilliant, historical novelist, Caleb Carr. Two will give you relief. One will not... 1. History can save you. A lot of people write thrillers. But Caleb wasn't sure how he'd set himself apart. But he found a simple solution. Training + Interest = Success Caleb is a trained historian. He has an interest in serial killer novels. And now he's a bestselling author. He writes historical thrillers where characters like Theodore Roosevelt and Alexander Hamilton rescue neglected children from serial killers. 2. Pain reinvented is freedom. Caleb needed to write... (as all writers do). But he didn't want to write a memoir like his father's pack. He tried it once. "I found the experience incredibly creepy." So he found fiction. Caleb said he's not depressed but feels "intense melancholia." "It's a dark, dark place you go." "Are you able to function with it?" I asked. "Oh yeah," he said, "that's when I work." 3. Always end on a cliffhanger Every unresolved problem in my life is a cliffhanger.Cliffhangers keep the story going. They create chaos. So I just stay curious. Caleb told me the warning signs of a serial killer: childhood violence, torture against animals, fires. "I loved starting fires," he said. "I set my house on fire when I was four years old. It was the only time my father didn't hit me." I later asked if he has sociopathic tendencies... "functional sociopathic tendencies." "Ummmm..." He was thinking 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!... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

One good story can save your life... (literally). Jordan was taken, strapped to a chair and kicked around. First in Serbia and then again in Mexico. But you already knew this. Here's what you didn't know... I was taken too. Or at least it felt like it. Everyone reading this has talents. And you want to express those talents. Maybe you feel taken too. You want to choose yourself but you don't know where to start. The first step is simple... get a teacher. I want to be that teacher. Why? I don't know really. I've experience so many opportunities that bring me joy. And new ones still come up. When I got rid of my apartment, strangers all over the world offered me warm meals, friendship, places to sleep. And the emails still come in. They offer to feature me in their books, on their websites and podcasts. Jordan Harbinger says "Always be giving." So that's what I try to do. I want to give back. And hopefully you can experience some of the joys I've had too. So take my advice... Self-publish your story. Books are the new business cards. They create new opportunities and expand your mind. I became a bestselling author. Now I'll tell you how you can too. That's why I'm releasing a special bonus interview. You'll hear how my friend Jordan charmed his way into a better life. And how you can too using my "ultimate checklist before self-publishing." This is my personal checklist that I used to become a bestselling author. This is how I escaped. The cage is unlocked. It's up to you to walk out. Listen now ------------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 can learn a lot from a sociopath. How to be charismatic, charming, convincing... They know how you think. "That's the mindset we want," Jordan Harbinger said. He was kidnapped twice. Once in Serbia. Once in Mexico. He talked his way out both times. "We knew there was a problem," he said. "The cop gets in my face and says, 'In your country, can you walk around with no identification and no passport? Tell me the Goddamn truth.'" Jordan was in Serbia teaching refugees English. "Yeah, we don't need any form of identification at all," he said. The cop turned to his friend and in Serbian said, "I guess they really are free over there. I had no idea." They didn't know Jordan spoke Serbian. He ended up in a basement. Pipes were sticking out of the wall. There was no water for miles. Wires were everywhere. And Jordan was tied to a chair. They threatened to burn his eyes with a cigarette. The guard had a club and rakia, a homebrewed liquor. Jordan talked his way out of going blind and into having a drink with his kidnapper. I always say advice is autobiography. Now Jordan's made a career teaching ultimate survival skills through his podcast, "The Art of Charm." I asked him, "How can I be more likable?" "I think you're very likable..." Later he said I have "an un-punchable face." And I agreed. When Jordan was single, he saw a girl texting on the train. There was no cell service. I tried guessing what he said to her, "'I didn't get your text, can you re-send it?'" "No, no that's a great, pick-up line, but I wanted to disarm her. So I said something like, 'Are you gonna write the whole book on your phone?'" I asked him the top 5 takeaways from his podcast. He said everyone's decision-making process is different. "Everyone gets to the top differently." Jordan's interviewed world leaders like General Hayden, the former head of the NSA and CIA, Super Bowl MVP Hines Ward, and 500+ more. They all have stories. We all do. You could even self-publish yours. That's what I did. My life changes every six months. Maybe yours will too. I even wrote a guide called "The Ultimate Checklist Before Self-Publishing." You can get the checklist now (for free). Write a book. Sell it for 99 cents. And email me when you get your first sale. I'll tell you even more about this on Saturday. I'm doing a special bonus podcast with Jordan. You'll hear his two kidnapping stories and you'll learn about the 20 steps I took to become a best selling author. (If you don't want to miss it subscribe now.) But for now here's Jordan's top 5 takeaways from "The Art of Charm." ------------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 at a restaurant with this beautiful, thick-cut bacon. The kind you use a knife and fork on. It had fat running through it. And I felt that feeling when you fall in love in junior high school. My friend AJ Jacobs is going to prove bacon is the the path to immortality. "I am very skeptical of health gurus," he said. "You can find a study to support anything." I want him to find that study so I can eat bacon three times a day. And live forever doing it. I'd spend the rest of my life experimenting. That's how AJ lives his life. Every year, he does a new one. Then he writes about it. Most of our lives are lived in our head. Creation is when it leaks out. He's written four New York Times bestselling books. And he's the editor-at-large for Esquire. But you don't need permission. These four words will give you ultimate freedom to do anything you want: "It's just an experiment." Forget the gatekeepers. Just play. AJ has done hundreds of experiments. He learns from them. So do I. Here are 3 lessons I learned from AJ's hundreds of experiments: 1) Filter negative thoughts I believe in authenticity. But I don't believe in saying everything you think. If all the pain we created was just an accident, misunderstandings wouldn't need explaining. AJ stopped gossiping. He had to. It was part of an experiment. "There's a 1-800 number that Orthodox Jews have. It's like a suicide hotline, but for gossip." "How many people call that number a year?" I asked. "I don't know. I called it and found it very helpful." He said his brain is lazy. Mine is, too. I have to watch it. It takes a lot of effort to clear out negative thoughts. But when AJ's brain realized certain thoughts were being filtered, it stopped generating those thoughts. "I started thinking more positively about people." Some people don't know they're negative talkers. Or negative thinkers. Your brain is Jurassic Park occupied by predators. If you take care of yourself and filter them out, positive thoughts will filter through. Good people will want to be around you. The landscape will change. And new opportunities will come. But if you get the urge to gossip, call the hotline. 2) Practice radical positive honesty AJ and his wife ran into some of her college friends at a restaurant. They said, "Oh, we should all get together." But AJ didn't want to. He was doing an experiment where he was being radically honest 100% of the time. "I had to say what was on my mind, which was, 'You guys seem nice, but I just have no desire to ever see you again.' "How did they react?" "As you might expect, they were not overjoyed." "Did your wife yell at you?" "Yes, absolutely, she yelled at me. In one sense it was effective because we've never seen them again." "I don't know how she stays married to you." AJ laughed. And we still got lunch after the podcast. Now he believes in radical positive honesty. I told AJ I'd try it. "Give it a shot. You're very handsome," he said. He was lying. 3) Don't overlook anything One of the top 3 moments in AJ's life was with Chrissy Teigen. I already knew the story because he called me immediately after interviewing her. They were talking about religion and she randomly asked if he read "The Year of Living Biblically." She didn't know he wrote it. "The Bible says you should say thanks all the time. I took it literally," he said. It was one of his experiments. "I would press the elevator button and be thankful it came to the first floor. Then I'd get in and be thankful it didn't plummet to the basement and break my collarbone. It was a very bizarre way to live, but it was also wonderful because you realize there are hundreds of things that go right every day that we totally take for granted." ------------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... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Beautiful women with laser boobs. If you asked me "What's Playboy's future," that would've been my guess. But then I spoke to Steven Kotler. I asked him, "When are we going to start 3D printing houses and cars?" This was 7 or 8 months ago. But I was too late. China 3-D printed ten homes in two days. And they were cheap. $5,000 a home. Then they 3-D printed a mansion. And a five-story apartment complex. The future is rich in possibility. "We're here," Steven said. "It is really really real." "Today, for the very first time in history, pretty much anyone can have a global impact," Steven said on today's podcast. So I asked him, "If I'm sitting in my cubicle or I'm driving to work and I'm listening to this, how can I improve my life?" He told me about a woman in her 30s who graduated from Harvard, lived with her parents and couldn't get a job. So she disrupted the $256 million a year cosmetics industry. She combined a standard inkjet carton with a 3-D printer. With bio-degradable ink, she can print any type of makeup in any color. Then Steven told me how we're colonizing space. "One of the reasons we're not in space yet is because it costs $10,000 a pound to get something out of Earth's gravity well. It's really expensive. We need to be able to print in space." "My next book," Steven said, "not the one I'm writing now, but the one after that will be about the 4 enormous exoduses that are happening in this century. One is in virtual reality. Another is gonna be in space." "What's the other two?" "One is gonna be climate change migrations." "Meaning we're leaving earth?" "I don't think we're leaving Earth." "What's the fourth exodus? "I actually think the fourth is into our own subconscious... in our own mind," he said." He called them "interior states of consciousness" or "inner-space." Steven wrote some of my favorite books, including "Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World," which is also byPeter Diamandis, the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation. Bill Clinton said it's, "A visionary roadmap for people who believe they can change the world." Steven also wrote Tomorrowland, which shows you all the ways science fiction is coming to life. So far no laser boobs. But anything is possible. ------------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.

There was a time when the only word I said was "no." I think that was the best time of my life. But I can't remember it. My memory sucks. It was "the terrible twos." A defining age. You tell your truth. But everyone says you're a terrible person. And somewhere along the way you start listening to them. They make up rules. And send you to school, where girls wear white gloves and can't blow their noses in public anymore. I guess that's why they think it's cute when babies snot on themselves. Freedom. I went to Cornell, studied computer science, got a job at HBO, went back for remedial school because my degree wasn't up to industry standards. Then I tried another job. And another job. I ended up on Wall Street. I lived there. But that didn't stop me from losing everything. I had millions of dollars in debt. Not one million. MILLIONS. I thought my only option was to kill myself. Because I knew this for sure: I couldn't obey any longer... Imagine talking to someone for years. And everything you say gets ignored. You're going to hate that person. I ignored myself. So that's who I hated... I ignored my gut. For 20 years. Your gut reveals itself every time you say how tired you are or some BS like "Happy Friday." It's asking you to sleep, quit your job, be creative. To say "no." Information is power. So even if you make decisions off influences, don't you want to know what the components of your decision are? I did. So I asked an expert... 1. What are the forces that influence me? 2. And how I can cleanse myself of the negative ones? I interviewed Jonah Berger about his research book, "Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior." He's a Wharton School professor, a New York Times bestselling author and social influence expert. Google is one of his clients. We talked about: - Mirror neurons - "The power of mimicry" - Why I won't let my daughters win at checkers, chess or any game at all. Ever. - How to predict upcoming trends - What influences could be holding you back -And what steps you can take to be "one of the lucky ones..." I was picturing businessmen who ignore themselves everyday. Who don't drink water when they're thirsty. Who just do the same routine. They have no idea they're on autopilot. And it's killing them. They'll get a heart attack one day and never know what hit them. That was me. Until I chose myself and started doing these three things: 1. Find out your influences What's your day, week, year look like? And why? Jonah gives 20, 30, 40 examples in this podcast. He helps you figure out the positive and negative influences that are impacting your life. Things you've never even considered. 2. Check your gut Picture your insides. Your meaty heart. And the deep stream of blood keeping you alive. It knows the answers to your questions already... But you have to check-in. Because sometimes it's so quiet. It's used to being ignored. Listen and notice. 3. Then lean into it Start with small changes. Go to the bathroom when you need to. Stop eating when you're full. Linger a little longer. Give yourself space. When your gut knows you're listening, it gets louder. And more powerful. I'm still learning to choose myself everyday. And sometimes my gut disappears. But at least I know where to find it again. Listen now to hear how to identify the hidden forces shaping your behavior and create the influences in 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!... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What you'll learn from today's podcast: [6:58] - Who should everyone be an entrepreneur? [9:12] - How do you decide what a "rich" life is to you? [19:43] - Make $50,000 in one month with a simple site [25:03] - How to attract the right audience/customer [34:00] - Get better than anyone else in your space [43:30] - How to test your idea... before it "tanks" [54:40] - Two marketing myths you need to know [58:58] - If you want to quit your job (and start your own business)... do this step first -- I try noticing when I'm having a hard time. And if I want to ask why. If I ask, "Why do I feel like this?" my thoughts seep further into my brain. And I can't find them. "Where are you going? And why do I feel like this?" But "why" isn't the answer. "You are not your feelings." I've heard this before. It's helpful to have a degree of separation. Negative pressures take away momentum. It makes me lazy. And hungry. I don't think I'm ever really hungry. I'm just looking for a human excuse to get away from responsibility. But sometimes you have to admit where you really are. I don't have advice for you. I have something better. I have Ramit Sethi, author of the New York Times bestseller, "I Will Teach You to Be Rich" and owner of iwillteachyoutoberich.com and growthlab.com. He's been on my podcast before. Every time he's on, people want to know this one thing: "HOW can I live a rich life?" I told Ramit, "The person listening to this doesn't want to hear that it's possible to get rich. Because that's what everybody says. I want to hear specific tactics." And he's giving them all away. "There's story after story after story of people who have taken your courses and made money..." I said. "Not just made money. Yes. Of course, they made money. That's the least interesting part. A guy gets a $50,000 raise. That happens every day using my stuff." "Tell me a story of someone who's made $50,000 in one month." (Listen at [19:45]) I don't believe 99% of the advice about entrepreneurship. Because that advice is what gets you out of your heart and into your head. It makes you lost. Because you try to sell out. You try to win. You try to get rich. And you stop giving. So Ramit and I talked about a rich life. What is it? We came up with this: I can't tell you what a rich life is to you. I can only say what a rich life is to me. My "rich" life consists of four things. You just need to find what you're OK at. Because if you are OK at one thing and OK at another thing then you can be the best in the world at the intersection. But I'm getting ahead of myself. And that's how people fail. They focus on the wrong things, get lost, give up and never start again. They're at negative zero. Everyone wants to be at 100. But that's impossible. And wanting to be anywhere other than where you are right now is painful. Start by acknowledging where you are. And know that's the only true thing about this moment. Then you're out of the negative. And you have a starting place: you're at zero. Zero is the best place to be. It's where Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, every millionaire, billionaire, writer, rapper, author, athlete, and astronaut starts. It's where you'll start, too. And you can start right now. Just follow these two steps: 1. Acknowledge where you are 2. Trust that it's the start And then you can launch a rich life. Whatever that means to you. Listen to my interview with Ramit Sethi to stop asking "why" and start asking "how?" ------------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... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

He denied Bill Clinton's phone call. He just lost the NBA finals championship. "I was inconsolable," John Wallace said on my podcast. "I didn't want to talk to anybody. I didn't want to talk to Bill Clinton. I didn't want to talk to my mom..." "But doesn't that make you a sore loser?" "You show me someone who accepts losing and I'll show you a loser," he said quoting Cam Newton. -- In the 90's, I walked out of my job a loser. I didn't stick with it. The stomach aches tasted like metal. I walked across the street. And played chess against a faceless man. I'll never forget him. I won that game. That's when I learned it's ok to lose. "What do you do?" Carpenter, author, server. "I'm in finance." "I'm in fashion." It's the one question we ask in New York. "What do you do?" I wander. I read. I spend time with people I love. I lost in the corporate world. But I'm winning at choosing myself. "It's one thing to give your time. It's another thing to give your money. And it's a-whole-nother thing to give both consistently. That's what I've been trying to do," John said about his philanthropy efforts. "Certain people won't do business with you if you're not giving back." I take care of myself everyday. Then I show up for other people. I ask them questions. And find out what makes them work...how they grew, shrunk, and then exploded into excellence. John said it best, "Humility turns to fire. And that fire turns to greatness." When I lost, I started over. Just like John. And now, if the president calls, I'm ready. -- Listen now to my interview with John Wallace to hear his "choose yourself" story : "From Carjacking to World Excellence." Then I hope you share yours. Email me at [email protected] ------------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.

Mick Jagger fooled around with Keith Richards' girlfriend. I wouldn't be able to work with someone after that. But maybe that's why I'm author. And not a rockstar. The Rolling Stones became a new band every 5-7 years. They were "perpetual amateurs." That's one of the keys to staying alive as an artist. Or as an entrepreneur. Or staying alive at all... "Remain the same but different." And be "open to influence," Rich Cohen said. He wrote "The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones," an incredible book about the greatest rock 'n' roll band of all time, fate, creation, sex, influence and the art of reinventing yourself. It was "the gig of a century:" touring with The Rolling Stones the summer of '94. Then Rich worked with Mick Jagger on the HBO series "Vinyl." But this story isn't just about The Rolling Stones. It's about creation, corruption and reinvention. And the 9 ways you can reinvent yourself today. Listen now to hear half a dozen more stories about rock 'n' roll, fate, influence and inspiration. ------------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.