James Altucher_new.mp3

James Altucher: [00:00:00] You know, so I describe all the stories and techniques myself and many others have used to basically skip the line so they could be in the top one percent of their industry regardless of that industry, so they could monetize it and make money. Everybody wants to make money from their passions and their interests, including me. And I've had to do it several times.

Harpreet: [00:00:28] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the artists of Data Science podcast, the only self development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours. You can register to attend by going to Bitly dot com forward. Slash a d. S o h. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review. Our guest today is Hands Down, one of the most interesting and engaging writers and podcasters in the world, his wide ranging career includes being a chess master, a computer programmer who helped build some of the first websites on the Internet, a day trader and angel investor, a stand up comic and best selling author whose book Choose Yourself, was named by Business Week as one of the top 12 business books of all time. He's also written countless other books that are chock full of wisdom gleaned from one of the most expansive and volatile careers ever as an entrepreneur.

Harpreet: [00:01:52] He's founded 20 companies of his own. Several of them notable successes. But he's also had his fair share of failure, with 17 of those companies going [00:02:00] belly up over the course of his career. He's made millions, lost it all, got it back, only to lose it all again and eventually make it back. What I love most about him is his openness and vulnerability, writing with absolute transparency about what he has gone through, even during the times when he was contemplating suicide. He's written countless articles and has conducted some of the most revealing interviews ever with people like Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel and Richard Branson. His work has been featured in some of the most prestigious publications on the planet, including Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch. He's admired by millions for his gripping style of total candor and unflinching willingness to remake himself over the coals for the readers benefit. And for this reason, he's firmly earned his place in the pantheon of truly great writers. So please help me in welcoming our guest today, a man who is constantly reinventing himself and skipping the line, an honorary member of the Mississippi State Militia, Colonel James Altucher.

James Altucher: [00:03:03] James, so much for what a great intro. It both got me optimistic and depressed, remembering all the times I've gone broke.

Harpreet: [00:03:12] There's so many good lessons that you shared with all of us during all the ups and downs that you had. I'm super thankful and grateful that you're so open and willing to to share that stuff. And I can't wait to get into it. But I just want to start off by saying that today is January 21st. Your birthday is tomorrow. So on behalf of my audience, I want to wish you a very, very happy birthday.

James Altucher: [00:03:34] Oh, thank you so much. You know, you

Speaker3: [00:03:36] Keep your birthday on

James Altucher: [00:03:37] Your Facebook, like maybe I should. I don't like all those birthday messages. I think I'm going to take off that. The fact that it's my birthday just for the day so that nobody. There's all the birthday things.

Harpreet: [00:03:51] Yeah, that's like the only time I ever get anybody interacting with me on Facebook is when it's my birthday. So it's like the one time of year that I, like, log into there and and get [00:04:00] all that notifications. And then you're going to get bombarded with notifications tomorrow surmisal

Speaker3: [00:04:04] Just like you did or

Harpreet: [00:04:05] Hide it. Yeah. How you do that anyway. So, yeah. What would you say was your best birthday ever.

James Altucher: [00:04:14] Oh, I don't know, I've had a worst birthday ever where I was I was going was one of the times I was going broke and a friend of mine says, oh, I'll take you out to dinner. And so we go out to dinner, but all his friends show up and I end up paying for the dinner. And I was just feeling kind of like depressed and lonely and nothing was working out. And that was when that was the big four. Oh, that was my fortieth birthday. So anything is better than that. And then I had another one and I was a Thanksgiving. I've had some bad holidays. I don't like I don't like birthdays.

Harpreet: [00:04:45] Well, what do you have planned for tomorrow? Nothing. I just hanging out. Yeah. So. I mean, you've had such like a roller coaster of a career and you've gone through a lot in your life. I'm wondering how do you define luck and what is your relationship with it?

James Altucher: [00:05:04] You know, there's a saying, it's a cliche, luck favors the prepared, and it's really true that I'll give you an example in chess. If you win, sometimes your opponent says you were just lucky, but it always seems to be the case that the the the people who are lucky are also the people who are ranked ranked higher. So it's not that they were lucky that they were simply better players and more able to take advantage of maybe a mistake or a blunder from the other side. So that's the case with almost all of luck. Like it's very rarely like someone says, oh, I wish my life would change. And then suddenly they win the lottery, or it's very rare that someone is, like, sick in bed for months at a time and they suddenly get this, like, great new job. I'm not saying, look, sometimes people are sick and that's what happens, but it's unlikely that you're going to suddenly get lucky during that time.

Speaker3: [00:05:58] You might get

James Altucher: [00:05:58] Lucky with your illness, but you're going [00:06:00] to get lucky with, you know, suddenly you get promoted to be CEO of whatever. And, you know, so it's really true luck. There's a lot of things that create luck. One is if you're physically healthy, you're going to be luckier. That's just a fact. Like if you're

Speaker3: [00:06:17] If if you're in

James Altucher: [00:06:18] Good relationships, you're going to be luckier. So if you spend all day arguing with your spouse, that takes a lot of energy. You're not going to have an opportunity to take advantage of luck when it happens. If you're spending all day angry or fearful about relationships or friends or spouses or whatever, if you're not creative, you're not going to be as lucky. Like creativity is a muscle. And like any other muscle in the human body, it atrophies without use. And so I always try to be creative every day so that when luck comes and needs you to be a little creative, the muscle is built up. You don't have to rely on a muscle that's atrophied. If you needed to run when you've been in bed for three weeks, you wouldn't be able to you would need physical therapy. And then luck also favors the people who don't dwell on the past or have anxiety about the future. And that's a difficult one for me. But if if something bad happens to you, like for me, if I went broke or got divorced or whatever, that's bad. And I regret it often. But you move on. You can't succeed if you're living. You can't succeed in the future. If you're still living in the past, you learn from the past and you move on and anxiety about the future. Everybody has it. I have it. Most of the things that we're anxious about, oh, my gosh, I'm going to go broke in two years or whatever. These things never come true. So learning those four things physical, emotional, creative and let's call it spiritual health is critical to setting the foundation to let luck enter your life. It's not a mystical thing. It's just very

James Altucher: [00:07:52] Practical. Luck happens all the

James Altucher: [00:07:54] Time, but you have to be ready to accept it.

Harpreet: [00:07:57] So it seems like there's kind of a relationship between [00:08:00] the inner monologue that you have and maybe the the thoughts that are running in your head and the luck that you're able to create for yourself in your life. So I'm curious, you kind of touched there a little bit,

Harpreet: [00:08:13] But how is your

Harpreet: [00:08:14] Inner monologue different in the times that you felt lucky versus the times that you felt unlucky?

James Altucher: [00:08:23] Well, you know, I've gone broke so many times that I sort of had to ask. It's almost like, well, statistically significant for me, going broke, coming back or broke, coming back, going broke, bouncing back. And I kind of had to ask myself, well, what is going right on the way up and what is going wrong on the way down? It was happening so many times I could see patterns. And it was like I said earlier, the times when I was growing up, I was laying the foundation for luck. So I was writing ideas every day, for instance, and sending those ideas to people if if possible. Sometimes I would. Sometimes I wanted. So that creates potential opportunities for yourself. I was staying healthy, which means eat well, sleep well, exercise well, not huge, but enough. I was taking care of my relationships with my spouse, with my children, with my friends, with my coworkers. So all of these things made was the difference between me when I was having luck and me when I was extremely unlucky. Like if you start Letting the creativity Muscle atrophy, your luck will change extremely quickly. If you start having problems in your most intimate relationships, your luck will go down the tubes. If you start getting sick, you're not going to have new luck. And so these are these are all things that are very if you dwell with on regret too much, you're not going to be lucky because you're too busy dwelling on, you know, how unlucky you are.

Harpreet: [00:09:43] I absolutely love that part of your daily practice, so you guys listening, if you don't know James story, if you read his book, choose yourself to talk about his legal practice that he does when he tries to improve one percent better in four different kind of dimensions of his life. One of them being the the creativity or working that [00:10:00] idea myself, which has had a tremendous influence on me. I've got my idea journal right here. I write down my ten ideas every day. Um, it's been it's been fun. And I try to write ideas and then just come up with a really, really shitty ideas. We'll get we'll get your idea, the idea practice a little bit. But I just want to say that you've got another huge milestone coming up on February. Twenty third, your book, Skip the Line is coming out huge. Congratulations on that. You which book? No. Is this going to be for you?

James Altucher: [00:10:31] I think twenty five.

Harpreet: [00:10:32] Twenty five. Holy shit, man. I mean, I'm a huge fan of your work. I've read what choose yourself to just help guide to world to reinvent yourself. Rich employee power of know think like a billionaire. Some of my favorite favorite works. You've written so many books covered a wide range of topics. So what are you saying? And skip the line that you haven't already said.

James Altucher: [00:10:55] Yeah, I mean it's a good point because a good question because I you know, I really wanted to not repeat, you know, the concepts from Choose Yourself, which was a book I wrote, which is still very much relevant in today's society. And I wrote a few years ago you a lot of those principles are all you really need, but I really wanted to make sure that I was saying something new. And the thing is, we skip the line so many times I've switched my passions, my interests, my careers, my jobs. And people would always tell me, you can't you're you're so, you know, so many years old, you can't switch from this to this and expect to make money or do well or reach the top of an industry. And I was like, why not? And whenever someone would tell me, you can't

Speaker3: [00:11:44] Do this, it usually

James Altucher: [00:11:45] Meant they can't do it. And I wanted to tell people,You know, here are The techniques. You can switch passions and interests and industries any time in your life. Doesn't matter if you have a mortgage to pay or children to raise. I had I have those [00:12:00] things as well. And here are the techniques I've used to skip the line to basically, you know, people would say to me, oh, can't succeed this. You've got to pay your dues. You've got to start from the bottom. And I'm like, I'm fifty years old. I'm not going to start from the bottom. And, you know, so I describe all the stories and techniques myself and many others have used to basically skip the line so they could be in the top one percent of their industry regardless of that industry, so they could monetize it and make money. Everybody wants to make money from their passions and their interests, including me. And I've had to do it several times.

Harpreet: [00:12:34] And one thing that's super important, I think, that I've heard you say a few times is the money is just a byproduct of you just doing great things right. If you improve just that one percent in those four dimensions of your life, get one percent better every day. Money is just like a byproduct of doing all that awesome stuff. So you've got the subheading of that book, Ten Thousand Experiments. Talk to us about what this means and and why are you rebelling against the ten thousand hour rule?

James Altucher: [00:13:01] Well, the ten thousand, our rule says, and this was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. But also the concept was developed by doctors Anders Ericsson, who wrote a book called Peak. But he's also been a professor studying this for decades, studying studying excellence for decades. And he basically said that if you spend 10000 hours, I'm not just doing something, but doing something with what he calls deliberate practice, like studying with a coach, getting feedback, repetition and so on. You'll if you do this for 10000 hours, you'll be among the best in the world at whatever it is. But I think this is a very narrow way to look at excellence. Like, you know, sometimes, you know, business being an excellent business person or an entrepreneur that doesn't necessarily need 10000 hours. You need to just have a good idea. And, you know, maybe execution is a skill that you need to get better at, but you could still execute enough on a good idea that you could be very successful with it or, you know, some art forms. Somebody [00:14:00] might be, you know, naturally talented and need less time. I felt like this 10000 hours was too much of, like, a straitjacket, like, oh, I can't get better at the violin now, I guess because I'm too old. It's going to I don't have 10000 hours.

James Altucher: [00:14:14] But the reality is you can do it. I prefer something what I call the ten thousand experiment roll where you don't necessarily need ten thousand experiments. But if you if you're interested in something, start start learning about it. Start experimenting with different ideas in this new industry. Like let's say I don't know. You want to make a new line of clothing. Well, don't raise money. Don't raise a million dollars. To create a line of clothing, maybe kind of put it together, put one outfit together yourself and start wearing the clothes and see if people like it. That's an experiment. It's an experiment. An experiment has several qualities. One is you're trying to prove a theory that nobody has tried to prove yet. So that's why it could be an interesting business. It could be an interesting idea for a career. It could be whatever. Another aspect of an experiment is that it has little downside, but enormous upside. So when Thomas Edison was trying to try to different wires to make a light bulb, there was no downside. OK, this wire didn't work onto the next one, but there was huge upside. He could make a light bulb and create General Electric, one of the biggest companies in history. So so, again, that's an experiment has little downside, enormous upside.

James Altucher: [00:15:30] The other aspect of an experiment is that most experiments fail again. Using Thomas Edison. He tried ten thousand wires before he found the right one to make a light bulb. So all these things you should take into consideration. But the idea is you don't have to study the mathematics of electrons and how they pass through conductors and electricity. You just have to experiment with a wire and a light bulb and know something about the field of electricity. And then you'll you know, these experiments [00:16:00] can create the biggest company of all time, Larry Page. He experimented with search engines. He said, well, how about we try this idea that's never been tried on search engines. Let's take the way they rank academic papers. You know, there's a system that academics have used for one hundred years to rank. Which papers are more important research than other papers? Let's use that technique to rank pages on the Internet. So we did this experiment. Little downside. It was easy for him to implement and he created Google huge upside and he became the top entrepreneur on the planet without putting 10000 hours in so experiments could speed up your your success in a field, not necessarily your knowledge, but your expertize and your success in the field by, you know, a thousand percent potentially.

Harpreet: [00:16:50] So when it comes to doing experiments, do we want to do them kind of towards one direction that we are kind of have as an objective, or is it just wide ranging experiments, casting a wide net, trying to see what catches and going to

Speaker3: [00:17:03] That wide,

James Altucher: [00:17:04] Wide ranging? Because how do you know what your objectives are when you're first beginning something like you could say to yourself, let's say you want to be a great, you know, inventor of electric cars. You could say to yourself, well, I need to know how to build an electric car and I need to really study how to build an electric car. That's my objective. Or you could you could say I need to just find you could start studying how to build an electric car, but you could realize, oh, this is hard. I don't know how to do it. I guess I should give up. But no, you could call up an expert at building and hire an expert who knows how to build cars and knows everything about batteries. And so, you know, you don't need to you don't necessarily know in the beginning of something what's going to be the path to success. That's the whole point of beginning something is that you don't know yet. You might be interested in something, but you don't know yet what the criteria for success.

Harpreet: [00:17:59] And when [00:18:00] we're coming up with with experiments, should we try to construct them or design them in such a way that we make sure that we learn something? Or is it just I'm going to just try this shit out and if it works great,

James Altucher: [00:18:14] You'll you'll always learn, because I'll take Thomas Edison once again as an example. Thomas Edison, somebody asked him when he announced his invention of the light bulb. Someone asked him, what was it like to fail? Ten thousand. Your first 10000 times you experimented with different wires. And he said, I didn't fail 10000 times. I learned ten thousand ways not to make a light bulb. That's the thing you're always going to learn even an experiment that doesn't work out. You're always going to learn what doesn't work or are you going to learn something new? I'll give you can I give you a little example of something that I was once doing a little experiment on to figure out if it would be a good business? Absolutely. So it's a dumb business idea, but I figured but when you kind of get good at, then you have time to try dumb things because you won't take up too much time or money. So I met some friends for brunch and they had just started going out and I said, how's it going? And they said, Oh, we had the conversation. We're going to start going steady. And I'm like, going steady. Do people even use that phrase anymore as such, like an antique phrase to use? And but then I was thinking, what does it even mean, going steady for adults and in today's day and age? And so I came up with an idea for an app, the Going Steady app. And so let's say two people decide they're going to start going steady, they get the going steady app and they connect to each other. And that will automatically delete all of the dating apps from their phone and it will notify the other if they ever install like a dating app again. And that's the Going Steady app. And there was a few other features, but that's the basic idea.

Speaker3: [00:19:57] And so I figured, OK,

James Altucher: [00:19:59] I'll do a little [00:20:00] experiment. I wrote up the spec of what this app should look like. You know what every page will look like, what every button will do, what the functionality is and so on. And then I put it on Freelancer again and tried to hire a freelancer to do it. And, you know, freelancer, Doug, you post the project and a budget and people bid lower and lower to try to get the job from you. And all these people from different countries were bidding. And I had one question for them, which is, can an iPhone and an Android, can an app see what other apps exist on the phone because they're going steady? App would have to see the other dating apps on the phone. And so a lot of people kept saying, yeah, yeah, don't worry, we'll do it, we'll do it. But that one person told me the truth, which is that Android could do it, iPhone can. And so that was the end of that idea done. I couldn't I couldn't do that idea because you can't make it on my iPhone. And I learned something about mobile app programing I didn't know before. And I also learned how many people were typically dishonest in answering basic questions. And that was an experiment that it didn't have the huge upside. But I still learn something.

Harpreet: [00:21:09] I absolutely love that I try to find those type of things in my life as well, where I try to do something, I call them like high leverage activities, where I do something, but it takes off like five or six different boxes. Right. So by doing this one thing, I can it accomplishes so many different things. Right. So for me, I do a what I call a office hour where every week I have people who listen to the podcast come in on a Friday and we just answer questions for them about whatever they have for their Data science career questions. And it just creates not only more content for the podcast, generates the email list and provides value to people at the same time. So it is one of these high leverage activities I like to think of, man. So 25 bucks, what would you say is like a core message

Speaker3: [00:21:55] That

Harpreet: [00:21:56] You have across your books that you want people to take away? And [00:22:00] how does this book expand on that core message?

James Altucher: [00:22:03] I mean, the core messages that most people. Including me, including you, including everyone, most people have no clue about anything, so like you ever notice on Twitter during this whole pandemic, all your friends and family and coworkers were suddenly amazingly, they had PhDs in epidemiology. All of a sudden, like everyone was commenting on the coronavirus, like they were experts or when when we bombed that Iranian general, suddenly everyone was a political pundit, military general on the side. They were a janitor by day and a political expert, you know, war expert by night. And most people just don't really know anything. And yet they're willing to give their opinions to you. They're willing to tell you what you can do and what you can't do. And my point of view is that we're in a society now where no one is going to take care of you. You know, there's one hundred twenty eight million workers in the United States, 55 million of them filed for unemployment during the economic lockdown. That's a big number. And it shows that corporations aren't as loyal as they claim to be. They don't care at all about their employees in most cases. And so you have to kind of choose yourself, basically, which is you have to take care of your money, your health, your future, your opportunities, your interests. You only have one life. So if you're interested in gardening, don't spend your entire life doing, you know, being a project manager at Proctor and Gamble.

James Altucher: [00:23:33] If that's if you want to do that, do that. But if you want to do gardening and make a career out of it, I'm telling you, you can choose to get a career out of it and there's ways to skip the line. So you could immediately be in the top one percent of your industry and start making money. And a lot like a book is a great example. Typically to write and publish a book and make money on a book, you have to write the book first. You have to get an agent. [00:24:00] The agent has to find a bunch of editors, one of whom I like it. You have to get a deal. You have to have a marketing department like you, a publisher like you, a bookstore like you. There's all these hurdles you have to jump through to publish a book or you could choose yourself. I could write the book. I could hire my own editor. I can hire my own design or design a cover myself. I could do my own marketing and I could upload it to Amazon. And now I've published a book. I've chosen myself to develop book sales with the TV show. I can make spend millions of dollars making a movie or maybe I can make a short and put it on YouTube. That's a legitimate way you can have more viewers doing that than having

Speaker3: [00:24:38] A popular TV

James Altucher: [00:24:39] Show or a business. You know, I just gave an example of, you know, me starting a mobile app business. Well, I've never written a dating app or a relationship app or any app I've never done in that business. And yet if that experiment and maybe a few more experiments had worked out, I could have created a big mobile app company without spending the 10000 hours. So this really is a step forward, not only in kind of the idea that the world has changed. And it's very important now to to focus on your own opportunities because nobody else is going to do it for you. But I give very specific techniques on learning, on persuasion, on all sorts of ways to get good and then monetize something very quickly, whether it's a side hustle or a new interest or a new passion or whatever

Harpreet: [00:25:29] You think to choose yourself era it would be possible without the Internet. Or do you think that this is just a consequence of like the Internet means that we can now choose ourselves, that at scale

James Altucher: [00:25:41] The Internet certainly helps because like I gave the example of book publishing, I could you know, there's Amazon is on the Internet. I can upload my my book and suddenly it's published. But you look at like some enormous best selling people like Wayne Dyer as an example. So Wayne Dyer was a self-help guy [00:26:00] who recently passed away a few years ago. And in the early 70s, he wrote a book. He was he was a tenured professor at St. John's University in New York, tenured meaning they couldn't fire him. He had a job for life and he wrote a book. No one was buying it. So he quit his job and piled all his books into his car and drove around the country from bookstore to bookstore. And essentially Self published his book and got all the bookstores to carry it and one hundred million copies later. He's a very successful or was very successful, very wealthy writer. He was he was one of the he was in the top of his field by choosing himself. That was way before the Internet. And there's examples in every category like that. The guy who, you know, made Post-it notes was an employee at 3M. And, you know, he wanted to make this adhesive for some other purpose. And it turned out it was Post-it notes. That's why knowing your objective in an advance is almost impossible. Or the guy who you know, whether it's a pandemic. So we've all been cleaning surfaces and wiping our hands with these dissin. Affecting. Well, somebody who was working for a computer

Speaker3: [00:27:11] Company invented

James Altucher: [00:27:12] A cleaning towel to clean the insides of computers without messing up the chips, well, turned out it was a good disinfectant for hands. And so he started his own business, became very successful. And that was a very choose yourself, skip the line kind of approach.

Harpreet: [00:27:29] Well, on this topic, kind of a wave of entrepreneurship, I really, really like your definition of what an entrepreneur is. Would you be able to articulate that for our audience?

James Altucher: [00:27:41] Well, it depends. I have many different definitions. You have to tell me.

Harpreet: [00:27:45] It was one where we talk about viewership is not just like a skill, it's actually like a better skill.

James Altucher: [00:27:51] Right. So I actually discuss this and skip the line. So there's no one skill called business. There's no just like there's no [00:28:00] one skill called tennis. I like if I don't play tennis, but I use this as a metaphor. Like in tennis, you have to get good at serving the tennis. Well, you have to go to the foreign backhand, playing the net, playing back. These are all different skills. The skill to serve is completely different than the skill for backhand and business. It's the same thing.

Speaker3: [00:28:22] Their skills in execution

James Altucher: [00:28:25] Or having ideas or sales or marketing or management and on and on. And management is different than leadership. And there's skills in business and investing. You have to have all these skills, you know, the skill of business as many micro skills that are all mutually exclusive of each other. And to get to skip the line. What I always encourage people is figure out a few of identify the micro skills, figure out a few of them. You could be really good in some way quickly through experiments. And those are the skills you should focus on rather than the overall skill of business. Then you could outsource or use others for these other these other skills that you need. Or for instance, let's say you're a writer. Well, you know, there's various micro skills in writing. There is writing a novel. There's writing a nonfiction book, there's journalism, there's ad writing, there's short story writing and poetry and writing a literary novel versus a thriller. So figure out the micro skills that you're good at and focus on those if you're good at writing a page turning thriller. Right. That if you're good at writing a short story, start with that and get published and start your career as a writer. If you're good at writing blog posts about sports, focus on that and get good at that. And like, like good to the point of being a professional. So you have to find the micro skills that you're, you know, have some talent at and then you start developing the skills. And if you don't if you can't write a thriller, that's OK. Start off writing what you can do and then later learn that skill or hire a [00:30:00] ghostwriter to write a thriller for you.

Harpreet: [00:30:02] So what are some of your your favorite myths surrounding the entrepreneur or surrounding the concept of entrepreneurship?

James Altucher: [00:30:11] Well, I think when people say 90 percent of businesses of startups fail, that's not true. So, yes, if I'm going to try if I'm going to announce to everybody, hey, I'm going to create the next Facebook, it's probably a ninety nine point nine percent chance I'm going to fail. But if I said I'm going to buy an already successful laundromat and it looks like they're selling it to me for a favorable price, well, I'm probably not going to fail at that. I'll probably keep running it. And a failure would be I sell it, maybe lose a little bit of money or I sell it and break even, but most likely I'll build it up a little bit. You know, a reason I'm buying a laundromat. Maybe it's because I saw some ways to improve a currently occurring one that currently existed. And then I could flip that and and do fine. Like, I think most businesses succeed, actually, or at least 50 percent. It's just a lot of tech companies like venture capital funded companies might might fail, but that's because they probably incorrectly did experiments to validate an idea. So that's another way. Another myth about entrepreneurship is that you need connections and that you need to raise money. All all companies that have started that were successful, I raised zero dollars for and I had zero connections for. And if you if you create a good quality product and you're good at storytelling, you're good at sending a message out, then you'll succeed. And so that's another myth. I mean, there's I could keep on going about this. There's a myth that you need to be technical. That's not true. Like Elon Musk doesn't know how to build space rocket, and yet he built the SpaceX rocket company.

Harpreet: [00:31:44] So it would you say that there is or a specific skill or maybe even not even skills, probably not the right word, but like a personality trait or a quality where, you know, we could say to somebody, you've got all the right pieces, but now you just need this one skill [00:32:00] and you'll be there. Do you think a skill like that exists? And if so, what is it?

James Altucher: [00:32:06] It depends on the. Fields like, let's say you do stand up comedy and let's say, God forbid, you don't even have a standard sense of humor. Well, A, everybody's got some sense of humor, but so you could you could learn and study humor and other comedians. But one thing, one microscale that's very important in standup comedy that people really don't think about is likability. You have to go on stage and before you even tell a joke, the audience is deciding whether they like you or not, and they're constantly deciding that throughout your act. So likability is an important microscale. And you know that one, if you're not succeeding at comedy but you think you're really funny, it might be the case that you haven't worked on likability. And I'm not saying you're not a likable person. I'm saying you haven't developed the skill of likability. Likability on stage is much different than just being a likable person.

Harpreet: [00:32:57] And you've been going hard on the stand up comedy for for a few years now, right? Yeah. So how did how did you get into that? Was there a small experiment that led to that? Or was this just a burning desire, burning passion that you've had for so many years?

James Altucher: [00:33:12] A little bit of both, like you tend to experiment in the things that you're interested in. So I have always been interested in comedy. I always wanted to perform. And one time I decided, OK, I'm a club owner, gave me an opportunity to go on stage and I went up and I was scared to death. I was so scared. It was the scariest thing I've ever done. And the second time I'm still thousands of times later, I'm still scared or at least nervous when I go up. But I fell in love with the craft of it, with the art of it. I mean, it's art, craft and science all rolled up into one. And I just think it's a beautiful art form. And I focused on it for many years.

Harpreet: [00:33:50] What artists I would love to hear from. You feel free to send me an email to the artists of Data Science [00:34:00] at Gmail dot com. Let me know what you love about the show. Let me know what you don't love about the show and let me know what you would like to see in the future. I absolutely would love to hear from you. I've also got open office hours that I will be hosting and you can register like going to Whitley dot com forward, slash a d s o h. I look forward to hearing from you all and look forward to seeing you in the office hours. Let's get back to the episode. A fear sensing a primal, primal emotion like how do you wrestle with that fear so that it doesn't? So it's pushing you from behind rather than standing in front of you?

James Altucher: [00:34:48] I think you have to always assuming something is not dangerous in any ways, or you could say what's you know, there's a couple of things. One is you could lean into the fear so that you could say, because I'm afraid of this, I have to do it so I don't even publish an article unless I'm afraid of what people will think of me, because because of the art, because of what I say in the article. And again, I don't want to insult anybody. I don't want to say anything that's going to, I don't know, ruin my career or something. You've seen a lot of people got canceled because of something they write about or say. But I always have to make sure I'm a little bit afraid of how people will react to an article, because if I'm not afraid, then chances are someone's already written this article before, or at least the ideas in this article. If I'm not afraid of what people will think, then I'm probably not saying anything new. In which case, what's the point of writing? So I think fear I think actually not only is fear something that's important, but it's important as a qualifier for doing something. Don't do something unless you're afraid of how it will turn out.

Harpreet: [00:35:51] So how can somebody who wants to kind of be vulnerable and expose themselves in that way, like how can they put away their their armor [00:36:00] or let their guard down, just embrace, embrace that fear and just go for it?

James Altucher: [00:36:06] Well, everybody has a different kind of armor. And so you kind of just have to again, experiment like maybe maybe you always feel like you're kissing ass to your boss. And you know that feeling when you're like trying to get someone else to like you and you feel like your center is outside of your body, it's somewhere closer to this other person rather than inside of you. And so always be aware, like when you're kind of outsourcing your self-esteem or this this central core part of your personality to somebody else. And, you know, I think that's I think that's really important. And then when you feel like you're more centered, start to say things or think about things that you normally wouldn't say. Like if you normally would never criticize the boss, maybe figure out how to give small, constructive criticism, like if if he says, let's let's call this project the X, Y, Z project. And you you. Do a survey of people and you could say, you know, I talked to 20 other people and, you know, 18 said we like this other name and two said we like this other name.

James Altucher: [00:37:15] Your name is fine, too. But I just wanted to tell you this, Data. What do you think? And, you know, that's a way to start being a little bit more honest instead of just being a yes man or agreeing with everything, you know. And this doesn't mean start arguing with everybody. You know, I'm just saying really ask yourself, am I saying something? Because I believe it. Am I saying something because it'll be good for my career to say something or write something down all of a sudden say, oh, you know, I went to jail for 17 years for murdering someone. Like if you're uncomfortable saying something, don't say it. But, you know, start experimenting with saying things about yourself that is a little bit more honest. And people always afraid to be honest because they're like, oh, no, if they knew I [00:38:00] went broke these this many times, they'll never give me money for my business idea. Actually, they'll appreciate your honesty. And they're more I've had more opportunities since I started writing about my failures than before. Then people want to work with someone who's honest.

Harpreet: [00:38:15] That's I like that. I mean, there's something about. Being open and vulnerable with how you fucked up or have you screwed stuff up in the past that people seem to resonate with and you see it all the time, like I mean, LinkedIn is my social media of choice. And you notice that the type of content that gets a lot of hits is when people are actually sharing their moments of weaknesses or when they failed. And yeah, that. Appreciate that perspective. James, thank you. I want to quickly circle back to talking about ideas. So we talked about your book, Shoot Yourself if you guys haven't read it. Check it out. Also, be sure to check out the TV show, Choose Yourself on Amazon Prime.

James Altucher: [00:38:55] I chose myself to make a TV show

Harpreet: [00:38:57] That is awesome. And like, I got to see the first episode on YouTube because it's not available on Amazon Prime in Canada yet. Once once it's. I can't wait to binge watch it. I'm really excited for that. But I'll check it out on Amazon Prime. Folks, if you're in the U.S., it that first episode seems amazing. But one of the things that you talk about heavily and shoot yourself and your other works again is the idea muscle and then this concept of the idea economy. So I guess talk to us about the economies that came before the idea economy and what makes this economy different from those.

James Altucher: [00:39:35] Yeah, I mean, look, in the eighteen hundreds, we you know, the industrial economy really hit full force. I mean, the Industrial Revolution started a little before then, but we saw the rise of, you know, significant increases in the speed by which we could go from one side of the world to the other, increases in communication, the invention of the telegraph and then the telephone.

Speaker3: [00:39:57] So it was all but we were

James Altucher: [00:39:58] Kind of creating the technology [00:40:00] that became the basis for everything. Afterwards, we were first drilling for oil. We were first making, you know, eventually cars and

Speaker3: [00:40:08] Airplanes like we were kind of

James Altucher: [00:40:09] Building all the tools that we needed. But now almost all the innovation is happening because, you know, computers have really added to every industry, every single industry, whether it's clothing or coming up with a

Speaker3: [00:40:23] Vaccine or writing

James Altucher: [00:40:25] Or publishing or creating, you know, ways to lose weight or creating new food, genetically modified foods, whatever it is you're creating. Computers have helped and computers are still growing at exponential rates. So, I mean, the power of computers. So really now the stumbling block is not can we make something because we can make anything now, but can we can we have ideas that are going to be useful and popular and you need to be good at coming up with ideas. And like I said earlier, most people are not most people have left let their idea muscle atrophy. You can't just turn it on after it atrophies. If you haven't walked in a month because you got into an accident or something, you need physical therapy to walk again. And it's the same thing with the idea muscle. You have to practice writing ideas down every single day or else the idea of muscle atrophy extraordinarily quickly. So, you know that that said, you know, we're at an idea, but we're also in an economy where it's not just enough to have ideas. You have to have confidence that you can that it's a good thing to help yourself as the main way to help society. People sometimes say, oh, if you if you're all about helping yourself, that seems really selfish. Well, think of the metaphor in a plane. Again, if there's low oxygen, a plane and you're with your baby, the oxygen masks drop down. You have to put the oxygen mask on your face before you even put it on your own baby, because if you don't help yourself, you can't help other people. And it's the same thing. [00:42:00] That metaphor applies to everything in life.

Speaker3: [00:42:02] If I can't

James Altucher: [00:42:03] Get good at tennis, I can't teach other people to get go to tennis. If I can't stay healthy, I'm not going to create a good business. So I have to focus first on being healthy in various ways. If I can't be creative, how am I going to help other people be creative or how am I going to create something that is going to help society? You see all these people like angry and protesting and this and that. Well, if you're angry all the time, you're not going to really be able to spread a message of love and hope and peace and be able to help people. So you always have to make sure you're as healthy as possible in these various ways before we start thinking you could help others or your opinions are so valuable that you could save the world or whatever.

Harpreet: [00:42:45] So proteins and weights, that's good for the body muscles,

James Altucher: [00:42:51] Maybe for some people. Fill in the blanks for yourself, basically how you can best help your health.

Harpreet: [00:42:57] But how about like the top of the idea muscle like so exercise the idea muscle coming up with 10 ideas every day. That's a good way to get that idea muscle built up. But what what about nutrients for your idea muscle. Right. So if you want to grow your body muscles, protein weights, that's good for that. But for the idea muscle, what do we need to strengthen that? Is it you know, do we need. More books,

Speaker3: [00:43:18] Movies, hallucinogenics. Well, what

Harpreet: [00:43:21] Do we feed our idea muscle?

James Altucher: [00:43:23] Yeah, I think the way you feed your idea muscle is what I did is one way I can do their own way. But I bought a bunch of waiter's pads because they're nice and small and they fit in your pocket. And it's easy to pull point things and it's hard to write too much. And I write 10 ideas a day down on it and I've been doing this for 20 years. And so sometimes it's business ideas, sometimes it's ideas for articles. Sometimes it might be an idea to help others. Like I might have 10 ideas. Google should use 10 ideas Facebook should use. And it's not like I'm trying to come up with great ideas. I usually throw out the idealist's the whole idea is just exercise. [00:44:00] So when I really am trying to come up with ideas for a product, I know that my idea muscle is like an idea machine. I'm like bulked up in ideas and the ability to come up with ideas and believe me, it it I can't express enough. It is a muscle. If you practice it, you will be more creative. You will be better coming up with ideas than your competitors.

Harpreet: [00:44:21] And so once he started getting some fit ideas, he started looking sexy and they started having sex with each other. So how do we how do we make that happen? How do we have idea sex? I know this idea you took from a rational optimist, things got really dramatically. I can't remember that really matter.

James Altucher: [00:44:41] Yeah. And so idea sex is very important. So I'll give you a classic example. Do you know the song Stayin Alive?

Speaker3: [00:44:48] Yeah. Yeah.

James Altucher: [00:44:49] That was the theme song of the movie Saturday Night Fever. It was by the Bee Gees, was the most popular disco song then.

Harpreet: [00:44:55] The food only makes it.

Speaker3: [00:44:57] Yeah.

James Altucher: [00:44:57] The Fuji's took you know, it's a hip hop group. They took they took Stayin Alive. They put a hip hop beat to it. They made some words, you know, more kind of their style, although they kept the basic song. And that was basically idea sex between the best disco song and one of the best hip hop groups. Wyclef actually been on my podcast, and that was and that was a huge hit. Of course, it

Speaker3: [00:45:20] Would be a huge hit. He took the best

James Altucher: [00:45:21] Disco song that 100 hundred million people love. And you take a great hip hop group, you combine them together. It's a hip or take Google as an example. You know, Google existed in America, so some guy in Russia said, oh, we should have a Google here in Russia. So we combined the idea of Google with the idea of Russia and created Melgar. You am I alg? Are you which is a, you know, 100 billion dollar company now. And so there's lots of ways to you know, what if I say let's take a phone and combine it with a music player? Well, now there's the iPhone, which was basically, [00:46:00] you know, the iPhone is very much a phone. It is built. It's not really that much different from other phones as far as the phone capability. And then it also has a music player on it now, a video player and and so on. So IDEO is this way of taking good ideas and combining them together to have a little idea children. And one of those might be good ideas. So I might say, OK, today I might take, you know, a laundromat. We talked about laundromats earlier. I might take the idea of, oh, I want to do a laundromat and then see what other industries I can combine it with to make it more interesting. Like maybe I can put a bar in my laundromat. Maybe I could put a bunch of ping pong tables and pool tables and arcade games in my laundromat. Maybe I can have a dance room so people could go dancing while they're washing their clothes. So this could be like a cool place to go. Or maybe people could get a haircut while they're, you know, I'm just making this up again. All of these things might be bad. Ideas probably are. The point is not having three thousand six hundred fifty good ideas, which is impossible in one year, but to have one or two. But the only way you're going have one or two is to have thousands of bad ones.

Harpreet: [00:47:10] So what would you say separates a good idea from a bad idea?

James Altucher: [00:47:14] You know, I don't know. I think that you have to if you any idea kind of excites you, you have to do experiments to validate the idea or you have to you have to ask yourself, why do I think this is a good idea? There's six there's eight billion people on the planet or close to eight billion people on the planet. Why has no one else ever come up with this idea? You cannot assume you're smart or you're a genius. So even when I come up with ideas that I think is good, I have to have various ways to test it or reasons to say why I have an unfair advantage, that this idea is very particular to me. Like who am I that this idea is? It should be better than others. Why am I coming up with these ideas and why now is this idea good? All of those help answer the question of why [00:48:00] this idea might be a good idea. And so and then you have to validate the idea with experiments.

Harpreet: [00:48:05] So for everybody listening at home, how I got James on the show was I wrote James a couple of emails and then I started sending him ten ideas. I sent ten ideas on things we could talk about and then told him I was gonna send him ten more ideas for the next ten days, which I didn't do because my wife made me not do it. She said, oh no, the hell out of you, but if you want my ideas, I'll send them to you. But yes. Oh, oh definitely. Then you're getting an idea today for the next ten days. Excellent. So I

Speaker3: [00:48:32] Did some crazy stuff like this

Harpreet: [00:48:33] Too. I sent I sent Seth Godin an email and I sent him a playlist. I said, these are ten songs that Seth Godin should listen to this weekend and just random things like that. Right? It's it's like zero downside. I could send you an email. You could ignore it. That's going to be the exact same outcome as if I didn't even bother to email you in the first place. Right. So I guess to me, a good idea is one that just no harm if you execute on it. Right.

James Altucher: [00:48:58] Right. And also, even with that, let's say somebody didn't respond and say Seth didn't respond. That's fine to most of the time when I said my idea to people, nobody responds, but sometimes they do.

Harpreet: [00:49:09] So twenty twenty is Rapp's finished up. You had at least three thousand six hundred fifty ideas last year. What what stands out as some of your your bad ideas for. Twenty twenty

James Altucher: [00:49:22] Bad ideas. Yeah, OK, I had one idea where I wanted to buy a bunch of. Apps, mobile apps related to learning, so these were all like, let's say as a kind of word game app so that you could learn and it was all a bunch of apps related to games. But also I felt like there was a learning component. So, for instance, a crossword puzzle maker could help people learn different things about history or a game where you, you know, see a bunch of letters and you circle real words could help with language learning. So I wanted to buy a bunch of these apps that were already profitable and making money, and I would [00:50:00] buy them for two or three times earnings, which is the way you buy companies. And I would combine them all together to make a big learning platform. So this was I felt a good idea and I still think it's a good idea, but I just didn't have the time to pull it off. And I didn't I didn't realize that. So I ended up wasting some time trying to execute. I got very excited about it. And I wasted time because I, I just didn't have enough time on my hands. An example of a good idea, because I remember the good ideas more than I remember the bad ideas.

James Altucher: [00:50:28] But a friend of mine I heard him on a podcast is a well-known guy. And I something he said one thing in particular, he said maybe think that sounded like the title of a book. So I just for fun, I outlined what this book would be and I sent to my friend, like, this is a book you should write based on what I heard you say. And here's why it would be good for you to write it. And here is like the outline of the book. Here's the 10 chapters that I would put in the book. And usually I wouldn't hear a response. But he responded like, Oh, James, this is a great idea. I'm going to do it. Can you help me? And like, no, no, no, but I'll help you all flesh it out a little more. And I wrote ten more ideas for the book, and I said that to him and he's like, Oh, this is great. Can you are you sure you can help me? And I'm like, well, I'll help you a little. Now, it's this huge thing where Amazon agreed. We pitched it to Amazon. They should publish. I mean, yeah, this is the project I'm doing with Charlamagne. The God, who is a big radio

Speaker3: [00:51:17] Host, has 10 million listeners.

James Altucher: [00:51:19] And we have a book now coming out March 31st so these ideals can turn out to be game changing things that might change your career. Like if that if this is the book about this topic, then and Amazon's going to try to make it that way, then this will be a huge thing for for me.

Harpreet: [00:51:34] I'm absolutely looking forward to that book coming out, definitely picking that one up. So we talked about some good ideas, some some bad ideas. What's an idea that you think back on now? And it's just like makes you laugh from last year?

James Altucher: [00:51:46] Ok, well, I had this idea that because of the lockdown's

Speaker3: [00:51:52] People no longer

James Altucher: [00:51:52] Needed to wear out or the normal outerwear like suits and things like that. So I figure, well, what's the most [00:52:00] comfortable clothes? What are the most comfortable clothes people wear? Almost by definition, it's pajamas because you can fall asleep in pajamas. And so I said, how about I make a clothing line that has interesting outerwear type of designs but pajama like texture and comfort and AIs as an experiment. I started wearing pajamas all the time and I started playing around with how I would design pajamas and so on. And I never really was that serious with it. I didn't really want to. I didn't really research that the way I would have if I was going to do a serious business. But I had fun with that. And it was a fun story when anyone ever asked me, why are you wearing pajamas, you know, at this, you know, restaurant or whatever,

Harpreet: [00:52:41] Do you ever watch that show, How I Met Your Mother? Now that there's this character, Barney Stinson always dresses and suits and he had like a suit that was just pajama material. It was was awesome.

Speaker3: [00:52:51] So, you know,

James Altucher: [00:52:52] People always tell

Speaker3: [00:52:53] Me I mean, I

James Altucher: [00:52:54] Even had waitresses in restaurants insist I was Ted Mosby from how I met your mother.

Harpreet: [00:53:00] Dude, I can see that.

James Altucher: [00:53:00] Yeah, people thought I was college, Ted Mosby.

Harpreet: [00:53:05] I could totally see that. And that's funny. I'm going to just the thumbnail for this on you will be Ted Moseley's picture. And so we talked about you were talking about ideas for, you know, due to this pandemic. What would you say are some good or not even some ideas that maybe an enterprising person could seize as a potential opportunity in this pandemic? Do well,

James Altucher: [00:53:28] Ok, think about when this is all over

Speaker3: [00:53:31] And people are

James Altucher: [00:53:33] Companies are going to be worried about. Nobody knows what the legal ramifications are like. If I have an employee who's at my workplace and he gets covid at the workplace, am I legally liable or is is am I not legal? If I'm the company, am I legally liable? So there's going to be a lot of compliance issues in terms of how businesses reopen. So there's going to be social distancing. There's going to be certain amounts. You're going to have to disinfect [00:54:00] things and clean things. So I think if someone created this is just one opportunity, there's many. But if someone created a consulting business helping companies deal with all the issues, like almost like, you know, coronavirus, you know, compliance in a box. So here's all the tools you need to disinfect. Here's all the rules you need. Here's, you know, we have recommended firms that can help architect. New floor plans to have cubicles socially distant, but will come to your place and we'll handle

Speaker3: [00:54:35] Will train

James Altucher: [00:54:35] Your employees, we'll tell you all and update you on all the legal issues as they change state by state, country by country. So I think there's a huge opportunity and no one's an expert on any of this because the industry doesn't even exist. But the compliance industry in general is a multi, ten billion dollar industry. So anybody who starts coronavirus compliance consulting business and then even combines that with some tools and products to help you be compliant, like, you know, again, different kinds of disinfectants or ultraviolet lights or tests or whatever. I think that's a business you could probably sell for 10 million within a couple of years.

Harpreet: [00:55:13] Absolutely love that. Not just the idea itself, but just the fact that you are open and just giving the idea away. I think that's very, very important part about that idea.

James Altucher: [00:55:22] Yeah, it's very I call this I call this the Google principle, which is that if I go to Google and I say Google, can you tell me something about motorcycles? I want to buy a motorcycle. Google's going to say, Hey, James, I'm just being honest. We don't know anything about motorcycles, but here are ten other websites. We've done the research for you here, ten other websites which we think are the best websites to tell you about motorcycles. Why don't you go to one of those sites and Google judges its success based on how quickly the user goes to the other sites. That means they provided information very quickly. So Google is constantly. But when you have [00:56:00] to go back, we have to ask something about, oh, I want to learn about what houses are for sale. First place I'm going to go Google. So this is the Google effect is that you constantly giving, giving, giving, giving, and maybe you make no money because of that giving, but ultimately you are the source. You're the place everybody returns to and then you be able to figure out

Speaker3: [00:56:21] A business model.

James Altucher: [00:56:22] So if individuals did the Google principle in their lives, OK, they might not be worth a trillion dollars. But this has value in life. Is is doing the Google effect.

Harpreet: [00:56:31] And one of these ideas that you gave away early on in your career that I think would be of particular interest to my audience, world Data, scientist, machine learning practitioners, mathematicians, statisticians, programmers, all ourselves. You were kind of a data scientist back in the day when you

Speaker3: [00:56:45] Developed the

Harpreet: [00:56:47] What preceded stock picker that that software that you'd created to pick stocks that you had just given away to a bunch of

Speaker3: [00:56:52] Hedge funds. I thought that was pretty fascinating.

Harpreet: [00:56:55] Would you mind just talking to us a little bit about how you did that?

James Altucher: [00:56:58] Yeah. So part of it was, is that I didn't really like any financial websites, like a lot of the financial websites. At the end of the day, they'll say stocks went up like oil futures drove oil down, but stocks up like they always come up with a reason after the fact. And it's not it's never true. Like, they just need space to fill up, you know, to get advertisers. So the reasons for, you know, most financial news is because most people have no clue what's going on, even the so-called experts. So I wanted to create a financial site that was addictive, the way a news site might be, but actually provide real value to investors. And so what was important to me was not so much what different stockbroker said on CNBC, but what was important to me was how what stocks was Warren Buffett buying? What stocks are George Soros, George Soros buying Carl Icahn or what? Stocks are the best hedge fund managers in the world buying. Turns [00:58:00] out they file these things in these very obscure filings once a quarter with the SEC. And I need a website which basically cleaned all the filings and posted them in a very easy to search manner. And then you can put up your own portfolio and it would you would see, oh, your stock. I would had an algorithm. Your style was kind of like Warren Buffett. So you might be interested in these stocks or these stocks. And then I created a message board, a Q&A system so people could ask questions and other people could answer. And yeah. And then I just kept adding more and more features and then sold it to the street dotcom. I was getting a million users a month. I was making money from advertising. I had no employees. It was a great little business. And then I sold it.

Harpreet: [00:58:40] It's so awesome that you created essentially like a recommendation engine of sorts to to help you find exactly something that's super fascinating and.

James Altucher: [00:58:48] Right. And that was after that was that was the tenth business in a row. I started the first nine having failed, but I did them in very short, experimental way. So I knew right away that they were going to fail. And then this was the tenth one.

Harpreet: [00:58:59] And there's something in there that's that's interesting as well, because you're kind of combining different types of ideas. And this is something that you talk about in rich employee. And actually it's that over the course of twenty twenty, there's three people who had a huge impact on on me, one being you, the other being Scott Adams and the other being already gone. And there's a commonality that I hear you guys talking about.

James Altucher: [00:59:21] And it's still good friends of mine.

Harpreet: [00:59:22] Yeah. Those looking for the. Absolutely. And have already gone down online. I couldn't find out, but. Yeah. And the reason I. Third of all, you guys is actually interesting. It's one common person that has kind of introduced me to all you guys. It's a cure of the don who's done who. Yeah. So that's some rocking this meeting right now. But he made that song Idea Muscle. He's done an album with Scott Adams, an album with Novarro. We got

Speaker3: [00:59:44] As well. So that's interesting,

Harpreet: [00:59:45] Combining music with speech and making it into a song. But all of you guys are also talking about this idea of combining skills or talent stacking. So what is it about this finding intersections [01:00:00] of ideas that leads to huge value creation for yourself and for society?

James Altucher: [01:00:06] Well, let's say you want to be a math professor, OK? And you're interested in, you know, the latest that's happening in math. It's very, very niche. Like, if I were to tell you what the latest is on math research, it would be so obscure and so niche that you wouldn't it would be useless.

Speaker3: [01:00:29] But what if I combine?

James Altucher: [01:00:31] Well, what's the math of I don't know, you know, what's the math of pandemic's? So it seemed like they really a lot of the early predictions about the coronavirus were wrong. I mean, they were predicting originally 140 million deaths within 18 months. Clearly, that's not going to happen. That was the very first prediction I saw. It was crazy. But there is a math to pandemics. And if you research pandemics, it's the same type of math over and over again, whether it's the Spanish flu or SARS or coronavirus SAMARTH. And it could help you understand what's the math of the average virus or flu does, you know, how does it mutate? How does it spread? How does it so you can develop a whole area and a whole new area of mathematics called, you know, pandemic math and do a PhD and that and that becomes incredibly useful. It's not so niche, but that's combining two industries and becoming the best in the world at the combination. It's very easy to become the best in the world at intersections, then the best in the world at something, you know, very that's been around for a thousand years that, you know, so obscure. Now, the the latest in mathematics is very obscure and inconsequential, whereas if I combine math with, I don't know, sports. So in sports, what's what's the math of, you know, and a lot of this is coming up with predictive math, but this is the area of big data. Like if I'm if I'm trying to figure out who the best football, [01:02:00] what the best football players, how would I do it? Well, let's now they have sensors on the shoulder pads and the helmet of every football player. So you can see the data

Speaker3: [01:02:11] Of which

James Altucher: [01:02:12] Side has been tackled more and with more impact. And you could see how that affects the ultimate score of the game. And it could suggest different plays to create more impact on the other team or less impact on your team and so on. So, you know, that's a case where I'm combining mathematics and statistics with football and also with maybe artificial intelligence

Speaker3: [01:02:33] A little bit. And I could

James Altucher: [01:02:34] Do become the best in the world of that, which could be that's a skip the line technique. If if the football industry or a football team needs to hire someone. Well, I could say I did my Ph.D. and I'm the best in the world at this. I skip the line. I'm in the top one millionth of one percent of football math. And so those are that's why it's better to be the best in the world at the intersection of two disparate fields than the best of the world,

Speaker3: [01:02:59] At a field

James Altucher: [01:03:00] That existed for thousands of years,

Harpreet: [01:03:04] Kind of kind of like this is all about connecting dots. Right. You've got to be open minded enough to connect connect dots. And I mean, it's interesting when you have a positive mind frame, how much easier it is to see opportunities like this.

Speaker3: [01:03:18] Yeah, it's like I

James Altucher: [01:03:18] Combined it recommendation engines with financial news websites and developed stock picker, which became kind of the only one out there like it. And it was a huge success. And, you know, I'm investing. I helped start up invest in a company that combined a lasso with a police weapon. So, you know, sometimes and we saw this in all over the world, you know, we saw these the BLM protests this past year because of the George Floyd incident and, of course, many other incidents. And the problem was the police don't really have any [01:04:00] ways to you know, they don't have any peaceful ways to stop somebody who they think is a criminal. Whether the person is a criminal or not is another story. And that was an issue with George Floyd. But just there wasn't a safe way to detain people. Even Tasers kill people all the time. So I'm involved with a company where they created a device that combines the ideas of a gun. With the ideas of

Speaker3: [01:04:29] A laso, so it's called

James Altucher: [01:04:30] The bull crap and it shoots out, I aim it at you and it'll shoot out a Kevlar steel cable at the speed of sound and it'll wrap around you so that you can't move. And the more you fight with it, the tighter it gets. Now, it's safe, though, like it won't hurt you and eventually you'll be able to crawl out of it. But in that time, the police will be able to capture. It's almost like it's

Speaker3: [01:04:54] Almost like

James Altucher: [01:04:55] Handcuffing somebody from a distance and it's completely safe. We get phone calls every day from people saying, oh, you just want you to know you saved another life today. So, you know, that's that's an example of ideas where I happen to have also made a lot of money now, because this is and this is a company that's incredibly useful to the planet.

Harpreet: [01:05:15] And I think that's that's awesome, man. And it's probably the weirdest fucking tangent ever. But since we're talking about startups, a lot of data scientists, you know, machine learning engineers, practitioners, a lot of my audience, um, we tend to go to work at startups. And you've got a ton of experience, obviously, with startups and investing. And sometimes they want to pay in equity and not as much with, you know, just a salary pay. So you can skirt this question if you want. I can move on to the next one. But I'm curious, you know, when does it make sense to accept, like equity from a company?

James Altucher: [01:05:50] Historically, tech firms offer stock options, which is, you know, a form of equity. And every tech firm pretty much does that like a venture funded tech firm [01:06:00] will always offer will always set aside 20 percent of the company for new employees. And they they will give that equity all at once. They give options out over time. You vest your equity is what is what it's called. It might be over three or four years. And usually then tech firms pay less salary because they're giving options. But, you know, it depends on the market. Like right now, I think it's a seller's market for programmers. Like, there's so much there's so many tech companies starting and they all need programmers that programmers salaries are going up. It's just a supply and demand issue. But in general, I would not sacrifice too much on salary because cash is king. And I would make sure I would get options because that's a very common thing in tech companies. So I would make sure I get both. Don't ever do something just for equity because it's probably a bad idea. If something is a good idea, somebody should put money behind it to pay. If you're critical, you need to make a salary. If you don't make a salary, if you're just doing it for free and like, don't worry, you're going to give you a huge equity. That's a bad thing. Don't ever do that.

Harpreet: [01:07:00] And something I think that you've been even studying quite extensively yourself. We've talked about a lot on your podcast. It's negotiation, particularly in these type of situations where negotiating salary, you're negotiating, you know, benefits, whatever. How can we position ourselves to be stronger when we're in a negotiation setting? You know, let's say we got a job offer. It's not quite what we want. What can we do to kind of get it up to where we want or maybe increase the equity shares or something along those lines?

James Altucher: [01:07:27] Well well, there's a lot of different ways. And I'll just I'll just describe the way that I'll decide one way that has worked incredibly well for me. And again, there's a lot of books on persuasion, but I find they're very academic and they don't actually work in real life. Whereas I particularly in my next book, Skip the Line, I talk about only the things that have actually worked for me and how they've worked for me. But this one's called the advice technique. So let's say I'm asking for, I don't know, like a raise. And I might go to my boss and say, listen, I need your advice. I've been working really hard. We did this, this and this. This year [01:08:00] I come here, you know, I'm focused on the work. I love it. I love this company. And now I think I'm doing, you know, twice the work of the average person here. But I want to ask for a raise, but I don't know what to. And we simply say, OK, what do you want? And the boss might say, you know, we have a hiring freeze right now. I don't think I can get you a raise. And then you can say, listen, I don't know, I'm not the expert at this, Mike. I'm good at what I do, which is what I do for the company, which is what I do eighty hours a week, whatever. But you're like you're like the grand master of doing these sorts of negotiations. You do these negotiations for a living and I consider you a friend. I just want to ask you advice. If you were me, forget being my boss for a second. If you were me, how should I best ask for a raise? Because clearly I deserve it. I mean, I don't think we question that. And, you know, some people are getting raises.

Speaker3: [01:08:55] How should I

James Altucher: [01:08:56] Ask for this? What should I ask for? Here's what everybody in the industry is making right now. And I'm making less than this. What should I ask for? I just need your advice on this, and I'd really appreciate it. And now they're going to be honored that you're asking for their advice. They're not going to want to give you bad advice. They have a cognitive bias against giving you bad advice. And if they give you the advice and then you do it, they're going to follow their own advice that they gave you. So if they said, well, maybe you can ask for ten percent raise and that'll be under the radar. Could ask for a 10 percent raise now and they'll say yes and or maybe you could say, well, you know, go to H.R. and say, look, you want to file for this new status. As you know, they'll kind of give up some idea that you didn't think

Speaker3: [01:09:37] Of where you could

James Altucher: [01:09:38] Ask for a raise.

Harpreet: [01:09:39] I love that man. I absolutely appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. Speaking of those, like academic books meant for the longest time, like I would just read of those, there's that special segment of books that are business self-help books that are just entirely based on like science and stuff like that. For the longest time, those would be like the only type of books I read. And it wasn't until really last year where I kind [01:10:00] of deviated away from that. And it's that taught me so much more like you learn so much more from other people's story. I don't know why I was so biased against those type of books in the past. But you're not a fan of those books either. Are you a

James Altucher: [01:10:13] Fan of what did you call

Harpreet: [01:10:15] Those, like business self-help

James Altucher: [01:10:16] Type of? Oh, no, I've never read any of those because it's usually somebody who really wants to have a career coaching or public speaking or whatever. And, you know, I'm very fortunate that I've kind of kept my business life away from my writing life, which enables me to be really honest and authentic in my writing. And I'm not trying to push any agenda in my writing. I'm just trying to say what I think is true. And these are the experiences that have happened to me. And I'm not trying to say, well, you know, oh, I wrote this book, so you should pay me money now to coach you or whatever. So I have nothing against people who do that. That's one method that works, but I don't do that.

Harpreet: [01:10:57] So last question before you jump to a quick random round. It's one hundred years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for?

James Altucher: [01:11:05] You know, Woody Allen, someone asked him, you know, don't don't you want to live forever in the in the hearts and memories of movie fans? And he said, I'd rather just live forever in my apartment. So it really just doesn't matter what I'm remembered. By later, I'll be dead. I don't care. I just everyday want to do things I enjoy doing.

Harpreet: [01:11:26] Yeah, I love that, James. So we'll jump into the quick random around here. First question, how many rounds of speeches did you manage to complete during this interview?

James Altucher: [01:11:34] Oh, zero. I do not do it in podcast. I did it once during a podcast and it really didn't work out well enough on the phone. I got into the habit of playing chess while talking on the phone, but then my ranking goes down so much you can't really multitask. That's why people who talk on the phone while driving, I can tell you your driving ability is at least two standard deviations. Worse, because that's I could [01:12:00] see from my chess abilities at least one to two standard deviations. Worse, and I'm an expert at talking on the phone while playing chess. That's what I've done for years. So now I try to avoid multitasking when I play chess because I'm trying to get better at chess.

Harpreet: [01:12:12] Now, if Seneca and Marcus Aurelius had a podcast, what would they title it, barring the fact that they

Speaker3: [01:12:19] Didn't really

Harpreet: [01:12:19] Overlap in terms of lifespan?

Speaker3: [01:12:21] But don't care. Don't care because you can't really

James Altucher: [01:12:24] Let outcomes affect your morals and ethics in the way you govern and so on.

Harpreet: [01:12:30] Yet been studying, studying philosophy of twenty twenty quite extensively. And it's it's really has helped with my stillness and tranquility. That plus like the morning pages from Julia Kameron, like that's been super.

James Altucher: [01:12:44] Oh yeah. Julie Cameron has really had a big effect on me because she helped me realize the ten thousand our role was. It's like keeping me in a straitjacket. And in terms of trying to succeed,

Harpreet: [01:12:54] Yeah, she was like, you're fifty three. You got beautiful hair and a beautiful smile. Why do you think you're too old.

James Altucher: [01:13:01] Yeah. Yeah. Like all you poor child like she was saying and she was right. And so that changed my view completely. So much so that I end up writing Skip the line.

Harpreet: [01:13:09] It's crazy man. That's awesome. Yeah. And her books are amazing. I read this way and then there's one where she talks about writing your way to

Speaker3: [01:13:16] Losing weight, which, you know,

Harpreet: [01:13:18] I'm shaped like an avocado. So I'm trying to, uh, to to slim slim down a little bit. And that's been quite helpful. So I used to watch Golden Girls a lot after school when I was younger. And I know that it's the show that you like as well. Which golden girl do you most identify with?

James Altucher: [01:13:32] Oh, I don't I don't know if I like Golden Girls. I don't think I don't think I like that show.

Harpreet: [01:13:37] But then I guess I guess I was

James Altucher: [01:13:39] I used to watch it with my grandparents and I like that because it was spending time with them and they loved the show, but it wasn't really my favorite show.

Harpreet: [01:13:46] Ok, so do you have an inner old lady then? If so, who is it?

James Altucher: [01:13:51] Well, I guess I admire Betty White now, just her ninety nine and is still very active. Like it's always funny how we love three year olds or like [01:14:00] young kids who are prodigies and we love 90 year olds who are still very active and lucid. And so I'm like, oh you got to see my grandmother. She's rides a motorcycle and she's one hundred and three years old, but it's like someone's fifty three and rides a motorcycle. No one really cares if someone's fifty three and passes away. No one really cares. You know, it's like, it's like a movie theater. There's two types of people who work at a movie theater, people under fifteen or people over 80. And that's we either send them to movie theaters to work or we talk about how amazing they are. So Betty White, because she's ninety nine, is still very active, is like amazing.

Harpreet: [01:14:37] So made you the Peter Thiel question. What do you believe that other people think is crazy?

James Altucher: [01:14:42] Well, I saw this a few months ago. I wrote this article in New York City is Dead Forever. Here's why. And nobody believed it in New York City except me. And they were all in denial because now the news every day is horrible coming out of New York City. But I dealt with a lot of hate for not from outside of New York City. Most people like the article about people inside New York City were just trashing me and trashing me and trashing me was insufferable.

Harpreet: [01:15:07] Yeah, I just heard about the the response from Seinfeld there. Yeah. Yeah. What are you currently reading?

James Altucher: [01:15:13] I'm reading, oddly enough, a book while I'm reading. I read at any given point two or three books, but I'm reading a book by Harold Robbins. He's like kind of this pop author from the 60s who was popular in the 60s and 70s. He's he has sold over 750 million copies of his books, but usually he's like a trashy author. He's considered he's like a I don't want to compare him to anybody, but but I'm reading him because usually I read lots of really well-written literary fiction. But I want to maybe write something that's I like a popular style novel. And so I've been reading him because I think he's got a good style. I'm getting a little tired of the John Grisham style, but I still find this guy to be a page turner. So I'm reading that right now. I'm also [01:16:00] reading a book about chess because I'm trying to get better at chess. I just finished Seinfeld's book, Is This Anything, which is a great book about comedy and I always read books for the podcast. So I'm about to start a book by Adam Grant that's going to come out soon. So yeah, I'm reading a bunch of books

Harpreet: [01:16:16] The same way for me, like I've got a bunch of podcast guests, read all their books. And so I was going to. To learn from them, what song do you have on Repeat

James Altucher: [01:16:25] Lately, it's Bill Withers, hope she'll be happier. All right. It's like this really sad, bluesy song, and I'm not into the blues or anything, but I just love the song. I listen to it over and over. It's like I love this song,

Harpreet: [01:16:37] But I have to check that out. Let's go to the random question generator.

Speaker3: [01:16:41] All right. Here it is.

James Altucher: [01:16:42] A random generator.

Harpreet: [01:16:44] Yeah. What's one place you've traveled to that you never want to go back to?

James Altucher: [01:16:49] Where where's your family from?

Harpreet: [01:16:51] So I'm born and raised in Sacramento, California.

James Altucher: [01:16:54] But where before that? Like India,

Harpreet: [01:16:55] Punjab.

James Altucher: [01:16:56] Ok, India, I have to say, is one place that I've traveled to several times and I never want to go back to.

Harpreet: [01:17:01] Yeah, I fucking hate it there. You never want to go back. It was it was

James Altucher: [01:17:05] Interesting for me to I mean, it's a completely different like it opens up your mind to what another type of country is like. And it's very different from going to like England or Europe or whatever, which is basically the same as here. But I'm it's very tiring to go there and spend time there.

Harpreet: [01:17:23] So now, you know, to Punjabi people from Sacramento, at least it is me and Ramit Sethi.

James Altucher: [01:17:29] Oh, yeah, I know very well.

Harpreet: [01:17:31] Yeah. Somebody I'm hoping to get on the show one of these days. Um, if you lost all your possessions but one, what would you want it to be?

James Altucher: [01:17:40] Uh, well, I did throw out all my positions once and I'm not counting, like, basic clothes, but I you know, I have to say my phone because I do so much stuff on my phone. I could read books on it. I could write on it. I could, you know, communicate with people. So [01:18:00] I hate to be cliche, but that's I don't really I don't have any sentimental attachment to any anything I own. I threw out all of my belongings a few years ago and lived in Airbnb for a while. So that was that.

Harpreet: [01:18:11] What are you interested in that most people haven't heard of?

James Altucher: [01:18:15] Well, OK, let's say I'm interested in something like chess. Certainly there are things. In chess, I'm interested in that even some chess players haven't heard of, so some obscure what's called opening's ways of opening the game that I like that are a little bit more obscure than the Queen's Gambit, which has been made famous by the show, or there's other famous openings. But I like some really rare openings. But, you know, when I like different styles of comedy that people might not have heard of. So that's it. I mean, there's no one major area that I'm interested in that most people haven't heard of.

Harpreet: [01:18:50] I saw some little of the last one from here. Pancakes or waffles?

James Altucher: [01:18:54] Pancakes like the best pancakes are awesome. Yeah, I like fluffy pancakes a lot.

Harpreet: [01:19:00] Absolutely agree. So usually I close with how can people connect with you? But you can just Google teams out to find them everywhere. James, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to come on to the show. And I really, really appreciate having you here.

James Altucher: [01:19:13] Thank you so much for your great job. And thanks for having me on the show. I super appreciate it.

Harpreet: [01:19:18] Absolutely, man. Thank you. Cool man. So, again, I cannot thank you enough for your time. I just want to ask you, what could I have done differently to make this an even more enjoyable experience for you as a guest on my show?

James Altucher: [01:19:33] I don't know. You ask good questions. It was it was good. I really had no problem. What could you have done? I honestly don't know.

Harpreet: [01:19:42] You did a good job. I will. Thank you very much, man. I really do appreciate that. And I think I'm a huge fan of the power Bible that, you know, Brendan Lemon, I've heard him on your show, The Power Bible and the the stoic salesman. So I've got to thank you for introducing me to those two books.

James Altucher: [01:19:59] Oh, no problem. [01:20:00] Yeah, they're great.

Harpreet: [01:20:01] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Love, love those books and be way out there.

Speaker3: [01:20:04] But would you mind

Harpreet: [01:20:05] Introducing me to Brandon Lemon? I'd love to get him on the show.

James Altucher: [01:20:08] No, not not at all. I have your email address. Right. Yeah, yeah. OK, yeah. I'll introduce you to him. No problem. I do what I call permission networking, so I'll ask him first. And this way I don't outsource to him. Yeah. The problem of saying no to you. Absolutely. If I'm sure he would do it, I mean there would be no reason for him not to come on your podcast. He'd be happy

Harpreet: [01:20:30] To. Absolutely. Yeah. That book is I think it'd be really, really great from audience to to hear his perspective. And like I've been through some of these Udemy courses

James Altucher: [01:20:37] And the Power Bible is written by him and this guy Bill kind of jointly written. So they would both want to come on if you're talking about the power Bible, but I'm sure they would do it.

Harpreet: [01:20:46] Dude, I'd absolutely love that man. Thank you.

Speaker3: [01:20:48] Yeah. Yeah.

Harpreet: [01:20:49] So again, thank you so much, James. I can't understate the tremendous influence you've had on me over the course of twenty twenty.

Speaker3: [01:20:56] Again, it

Harpreet: [01:20:57] Has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. I hope to have you back at some point in the future. But until then, I thank you for your time and have a good rest of the afternoon.

James Altucher: [01:21:06] Yeah, you too, Ari. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Bye bye.