Do this to ACHIEVE your Full Potential FASTER | James Altucher | The 2%

It's important to love what you do because let's say you're a writer, but you don't love it then, then if you don't love it, part of your energy when you sit down to write is convincing yourself to write. But if you love something you don't, you can use that energy that would have been required to convince yourself to do it. You can use the energy now to write better. Every time I wanted to change interests, somebody was always there saying, you can't do that. You didn't get an mba, you didn't work at a big bank. When you're passionate about something, sure it'd be great to be in the top 10 in the world, but to monetize, you really maybe need to be in the top 1%.

Welcome everyone to another episode of the 2% where we have incredible conversations with even more incredible peak performers to help decode excellence so that you can unlock your full potential. And, and I'm super excited to have as a guest on the show today James Altucher. Now James is an amazing guy. He's been a well started up a venture fund, he's an active investor, he's created, he's coded his own software, created software companies.

He's written over 20 books. As a matter of fact, that's one of the things we're going to be talking about today. So this is his latest book, Skip the Line, which I just read, absolutely rammed with all types of notes and highlights. So we're going to be talking about that today. But yeah, very excited to have James on the show. And James, welcome to the 2%.

Eric, thank you for having me on the show. It's a really real honor to be here.

Thank you. So one of the things I love about you, James, is that you've changed careers so much. And when I read about your story, I could personally relate to it. So I've done everything from being a doorman to selling chocolate door to door to building a landscaping company. And then I was a strategy consultant for McKinsey. And then I joined Skype in the early days before we sold it to ebay. Just a random order of things. And I always felt kind of like odd in that respect. And then I look at your kind of career profile and I go, oh gosh, he's done very similar sort of thing. And I'm just so curious, what.

Two things One, could you give people, could you give the audience just a quick rundown of some of those pivotal career changes for you? And even more importantly, what's the driver for that. Do you think it's something that's always been in you or is it something that came later in life?

I've unfortunately had to change career many times because I went broke.

Let's say in the 90s, I started a business, I sold it, I did very well, and then I went broke. I was over 20 years ago. I made bad decisions and lost all my money. I made millions and lost it. And it wasn't so easy then for me to just start another business. So I had to switch careers. I went into the business of I ran and started running a hedge fund. It's the business of investing. And then I've always loved writing. For 30 years, I've written every single day. But about 20 years ago, I started writing about investing because that's what I was doing also, as you know, for a career running a hedge fund. And so that led to book deals and writing more and more. And so over the past 20 years, I've written 25 books or so, not most of them, not about investing, because the writing itself morphed into its whole full career. And, you know, then writing led to podcasting, which is really a different kind of career. But along the way I have passions, so I was interested in stand up comedy. So I really wanted to get good at it and then make money at it. I really wanted to. I've always been an entrepreneur, so I've started different businesses related to my passions, made different investments related to my passions, built up a network that way. Ever since I was a kid, I was a chess master. So that's not necessarily something I monetize, but it's something I spend time on. And of course I've been, you know, a computer programmer. I've been again, an entrepreneur in different fields, an investor in different fields, a podcaster, and interviewed all sorts of people. So a lot of it happens naturally. But a lot of times I've gotten broke several times. And every time you go broke, I also have to reinvent myself with a new career or a new type of business and so on. And the key is I kept reading, like, to get good at something, you have to do 10,000 hours of it. And this struck me as BS for two reasons. One is I don't think I had spent 10,000 hours on anything except for maybe writing. And I sold several businesses. I was successful in a variety of areas. And I also, when you start, when you're passionate about something, sure, it'd be great to be in the top 10 in the world, but to monetize you really maybe need to be in the top 1%, which is a big difference. And you know, in Skip the Line, I write about all my techniques for getting in the top 1% of a brand new passion or interest or field that you're in. And, and not only that, then, and many books don't address this. Not only how to get good at something, but then how to monetize it. And that's even though it's a completely different topic, it's of course related. Why not make money doing something you love as opposed to just having your love be your hobby? And the genesis of this book really was every time I wanted to change interests, somebody was always there saying, you can't do that. You didn't get an mba, you didn't work at a big bank. You didn't, you didn't. You haven't risen up since you were 15 years old in the comedy world. You haven't. You know, you're too old to be a computer programmer or whatever. Like everything, there's always people want to tell you you can't do it, you can't skip the line, stay in line, pay your dues, don't think, you know, you could just start off and be the best and take over. It's not going to happen. There's so many negative people, but you have to. So that's why I called the book Skip the Line, because I've done it, I've seen many people do it and I didn't want to base it on academic research. These are actually the techniques I use. So that's the genesis of the book, really.

Yeah. And it's so liberating too to realize that we can pretty much do whatever we set our minds to do. Right. That we don't need to go through all those prerequisites. You have so many quotes in the book that I love. One in particular, when you say, understand that when someone tells you you can't do something, they are imprinting their own goals on you. Their truth, not yours.

Right? They're the ones who can't do it, or they're the ones who wouldn't dream of skipping the line the way you are. And so there's a little bit of fear in that. When they tell you you can't, they don't want you to do something they concluded was impossible. There's a little bit of jealousy. It's also a little bit of care for you. Like they don't want you to get hurt maybe, and they don't want to lose the person they knew. Because if you skip the line, you're not going to be the same person that they knew. The person who. Before you skipped the line.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the book is jam packed with techniques. And one of the techniques that you talk about is, well, you root it originally in the pareto principle, the 8020 principle, and you take that a couple of layers deep so that mathematically we arrive at take an 8020 of the 8020 and then an 8020 of that, and we get to close to a 50 to 1 rule whereby 1 1% of your focus could generate 50% of the benefits that, say, you seek in life. So if we were to apply the 50:1 rule to the techniques in this book.

That's a good question.

What's the answer?

Well, I think the answer is efficiency. So don't. I'll give you a kind of laboratory example, not academic, but laboratory, that I'm doing on myself. So I mentioned earlier I'm a strong chess master, but that was a little bit of an exaggeration. I was one. So when I was a kid, which was a long time ago, I was a strong young. I was in my state that I'm from. I was the under 21 champion and I was strong. But if you don't do something for 30 years, like any muscle, it atrophies until you can't do it at all. So, like, when I would play after this TV show, the Queen's Gambit came out. I would go on the online and play chess. And I sucked. I was the worst I've ever been, maybe in my entire life. And like, it's as if I had never played at all. And so I said, okay, I'm. I'm going to just use the techniques in my book, nothing else. I'm not going to. I'm going to be completely efficient. I'm not going to play mindless games. I'm not going to. I'm just going to use the, very specifically the techniques in the book and I'm going to not. I'm going to get as good as I was at my peak, which was very, very strong, but I'm also going to get even better than I was. And it's about three and a half months later and I've only used the techniques in the book. I didn't waste any time. And three and a half months later, I'm probably now a little bit better than I was at my peak and I'm aiming for much more. But that was strictly using the techniques in the book. There's a lot of ways people sometimes play tennis or play a game or do something mindlessly forever, and they never get better. And that's the thing with, with like chess or tennis, whatever. If you just keep making the same bad habits over and over again, you're never going to get better. So playing games doesn't actually make you better. But I proved to myself that using these techniques would make me a lot better very quickly. So that I would say then efficiency, like, don't be very aware of yourself when you're doing something mindlessly or, you know, you're not optimizing your training and your study. But a lot of the other techniques in the book are intended to do that. Like, I have a chapter on micro skills. So what a micro skill is, people don't really think about it a lot. Like, if I say, oh, I'm good at business, that doesn't mean anything. Business is not a skill. It's like a, it's a basket of many totally unrelated skills. Like, like marketing has nothing to do with execution, has nothing to do with coming up with ideas, has nothing to do with management or negotiation or even sales. Marketing and sales are two different things and these are all separate skills that could be learned. Now maybe that's obvious to some people, but not really. Like, people think, oh, if you need to be, you need to be good at all these things or you need to be just good at business in general. But that doesn't mean anything. You have to kind of make a study program that specifically, okay, here's how I'm going to get better at sales. Here's how to get better at negotiation. Here's how I'm going to get better at blah, blah, blah. And it's the same thing, you know, like with chess. I'm not just learning chess, I'm learning, oh, there's openings, middle games, endgames, tactics, positional play, and on and on. And you need, you need to use these techniques for each one of those things. But that's how you, that's how you apply the 1% effort to get 50% of the value.

Fantastic. And I love the efficiency angle. And that's a good segue to you talk.

Oh, I'm sorry. I just want to add one more thing. The 51 rule. So just for the listeners who don't know, the 8020 rule roughly means in the business context, as an example, 20% of your employees will generate 80% of the sales. So if you have 100 employees, 20 of those employees actually will generate most of the work. If you have a hundred, if you, if you're have a big programming project, 20% of your programmers will generate 80% of the program. And so what does that mean? How could 1% generate 50%? How could 1% of your employees generate 50% of the revenues? Well, think about it. In most companies it's true, the CEO generates, is the 1% that generates the 50% of the revenues in most cases. Or do you play Scrabble? Yeah. So in Scrabble, if you want to beat basically everybody except you know, the 50% who really take it seriously, the 1% is just memorize the 104 two letter words, legal two letter words. And if you know X, I, X, U, Q, I, Z, A are words, that's great because it's hard to get rid of X's, Z's and Q's. And it gives you a huge advantage. Huge. Over like the average player, not a superior player, but the average player. So that's where 1%, you know, you need to know just 1% of knowledge about words even less and you'll, that'll result in 50% of your wins.

Fantastic. And when, when, when you, when we talk about learning because a lot of the things that, a lot of the changes that you've made, a lot of the changes that I've made, they, they force, they require us to schedule learning into our day. Right. It needs to be programmed into the day. And, and you talked about efficiency and I love in the book you approach the lack of efficiency from two different directions. So one, you approach it from how many hours in the day are actually productive. And I think the stat that you use is there's a couple. And then you approach it from the other direction. You say well, how many days from Inc. They listed all these minutes spent on unproductive stuff. And it comes roughly to the same number which when I've done a quick extrapolation and if we look at unproductive minutes in a day, that's like 28% say of a workday. And if you extrapolate that across the number of work weeks in a year, that means that the average person is losing 13 weeks a year, an entire calendar quarter.

I mean it's horrible. I have taken a break from social media. When my books came out, I had to go back on social media a little bit just to, you know, you have to promote the book. And that's where I have my audience. But I from, I've come, I've had different periods where, particularly since like November to now, I've completely eliminated almost all social media, and it is. You save so much time. Sure, some people say, hey, where are you? I haven't seen you around lately. But they weren't really seeing me around anyway. They were just seeing me on social media.

And.

And once you're back, you're back then. And no one and everyone forgets that you were gone for a little bit. It doesn't like being good at Instagram doesn't really enhance your career unless you have millions of Instagram followers. Being good at Twitter very rarely enhances anything in your career. It's all just inefficient time. I love watching tv, so I don't really like to cut that, but I will only watch things that I love. I won't watch, like, random. I won't channel flip. I have a. I like good storytelling, and television's a great medium for that. So I'll watch something that I think is great. Other people might not, but that's up to them.

What's your favorite show at the moment?

At the moment, I have a couple, actually. I always have a couple. But I am still watching the 11th season of Shameless, which is a great show in the US and there's a show that I just discovered during this pandemic called Atlanta, which stars the rapper, singer, child, Childish Gambino. His real name is Donald Glover. He. I didn't realize how brilliant he was. He, like, directs, rights, created, produces stars in it, and he's just. It's just a great show.

Yeah, I've. I've never seen Breaking Bad, and I just.

Oh, Breaking Bad is unbelievable. That's the best show of all time.

I've just started watching it right now. I'm like, on season two. So I have, like, all of this, you know, time ahead of me to check it out.

I've watched that whole series maybe four or five times. Wow. Yeah. If a series is like art, I will rewatch it because there's not really that many series or shows that are real works of art. And Breaking Bad is definitely top 10 on anybody's list who's seen it. Yeah.

Well, so far, the character development. Character development is just off the charts, but. Okay. Okay, let's play a game, James. So let's fast forward 18 months. You've gone broke again. What's the likely cause?

Totally possible, but hopefully not.

So if I go broke again, and this is what I would do first off, I would do again, specifically the techniques in this book. Every day I write 10 ideas down. Not ideas for businesses or put Sometimes ideas for businesses, sometimes ideas for books, sometimes ideas for the podcast, sometimes ideas for other people's podcasts. Sometimes I will write 10 ideas that Google should do and I'll send them to Google, or I'll write 10 ideas for Amazon and send them to Amazon. But none of this is to get results. The idea of this, of writing ten ideas a day, is to exercise the idea muscle. Because it's, again, like any muscle, it atrophies. People think, oh, when inspiration hits me, I'll know it. People don't really know it. Inspiration hits them every day. They don't really know it. The idea of muscle atrophies extremely quickly. And you only exercise it. You have to exercise it every day. So the way I exercise it every day is writing specifically 10 ideas a day down. I don't keep track of them. Most of the ideas are bad. It's just exercise. But every now and then, some ideas are good. So I will sit. So now that I've been doing this for, like, 20 years, I. I will start targeting my idealist to focus on businesses I could do or industries that still could be disrupted and changed and so on, or things that I do that in my life that could be better. And I will start thinking, okay, if there's an idea I like, then the next day I'll make an idea list of, okay, well, what are the 10 first steps if I were wanting to try this? Or what are 10 experiments I could do that could validate that this is a good idea and not a bad idea? Because most people, when they have a business idea, there's a cognitive bias to think this is the best idea on the planet when most of the time it's still a bad idea until you really validate it, it's a bad idea. And most ideas are bad. So that's how it would start off. But then you can't just have. I have a chapter in the book called Spoke and Wheel. You can't just have one spoke. Like, I'll start a business. You have to have multiple. So maybe I'll start gearing my podcast towards that industry and I'll start joining, you know, building my network. Like, I'll. Let's say I wanted to be a, you know, I wanted my podcast to make millions of dollars. I would start networking the podcast a little more and start figuring out best practices for advertising it. Then maybe I'll even write a newsletter. Best practices for a podcast. That's another spoke. I could either charge for that or advertise. Once it builds an Audience. And.

Again and again. Whenever you have one good idea, that means there's multiple spokes. Oh, I have a good idea for a restaurant that's very different and unique. Oh, that might mean I can create a new kind of software reservation system because I have ideas there. Might mean I might have a new way of hiring because hiring is very complicated with restaurants. Post pandemic, everyone left town and people don't want to commit to a job where there might be a shutdown and they're laid off again.

So.

So hiring has become a difficult problem. Oh, could that be a business? Maybe a better business idea than even owning a restaurant. So. And maybe I'll. Maybe it will be a business. Or maybe I'll write a newsletter, high end newsletter for restaurant owners. Here's new technologies that will help you in the restaurant business given the problems post pandemic. So again, the wheels start turning. And so one business could lead to multiple ideas that could be one, you know, overriding business.

And the. I like how you talk about how it's an exercise because it makes me think about antifragility. So when we talk about antifragility, basically, stress creates strength. And people don't think of themselves as antifragile. But you stress a muscle, it causes it to grow. You expose the body to germs and bacteria, builds the immune system. They're doing it physically, they just need to get it up in their heads mentally. I just want to point that out because I can imagine some people when they hear that, oh my Gosh, you're writing 10 ideas a day. That sounds stressful. That sounds like some work. But that's also part of the point, right? Is that we need to stress that muscle to cause it.

Oh, yeah, it's so funny because always, let's say I have an idea, like I'm going to come up with 10 different ideas for zoos. I don't know, I'm just making it up. I've never been to zoo in my life. And I'll come up with seven really quickly. And then it always is the case. It's like magic. Even though I know this always happens, it still happens, which is starting around 7. I'll think to myself, have I gotten 10 done yet? And I'll start counting. Oh, no, it's just seven. And then I'll take a little while. It's like I feel like my brain is sweating to come up with the eighth. And then I'll think again. Did I come with 10 yet? Oh, no, it's just eight. And so the last three or four, it's like your brain sweating. And I don't let myself do anything easy. Like, I don't divide an idea up into two. Like, once it's in my head as an idea, I can't divide it up. I can't. To make an easier version of it. Like, I have to push myself for each idea, particularly starting on idea number seven.

And you said that the act of doing this, you felt that it actually rewired your brain to see more possibilities.

I know it did. I mean, when I started doing this, I was. I had gone broke, I was losing my home, the IRS was after me, and I was having a. You know, obviously all my relationships were falling apart because I was just so depressed. I was like, practically I was suicidal. I had these suicidal thoughts almost every day, and I couldn't even understand what it meant to, like, smile or laugh again. I thought that was never going to happen for me again. And when I started doing this the very first time, I bought this box of waiter's pads, and I started doing it on waiter's pads. Every morning I would do it. And after, like, just a few weeks or a month or so, I was happier. Not that anything had changed in my life. I was still losing my home, and, you know, I was still broke and going more broke because I didn't have any money coming in. And yet I was really excited about my ideas. And I started emailing people about my ideas, and I started planning a couple of books that I was going to write. I had never published a book before, but I was planning it and I was getting a lot of encouragement. And I don't know, it really did rewire my brain. I was not depressed anymore, even though nothing other than that had changed in my life.

And it's so interesting that you say that you weren't depressed anymore, because when. As soon as you say that, I think about the word possibility. Because when you're depressed, you sort of think like, well, nothing's possible. There are no possibilities. Right. And the act of creating ideas or as you're saying, possibilities, that sounds like quite literally the perfect antidote to depression. Right?

So, yeah, I mean, like. And you know, I've read a lot about depression. I've been depressed at a couple different points. And, you know, a lot of people say, oh, when you help other people, that gets you out of depression, or gratitude gets you out of depression. And I'm not knocking those things. And in fact, helping other people is often a part of entrepreneurship. Like, that's how it starts, is you realize some solution that could help people. So maybe it's all related. But I really found that this was the one surefire technique for me. Like, I was trying every medication, but, you know, people don't know the statistic. But when you're depressed and you start taking a medication, it usually takes about eight years for the average depressed patient to find the right medication that works for them. And I never found a medication that worked for me. I was, and I don't necessarily believe I was medication resistant. It's just there's a lot of medications out there, there are a lot of causes of depression, and it's hard to find the right fit. It's almost impossible. And so this really worked for me. Like, I was excited. And there's something else to it as well, is that a lot of people come to me like, well, how can you give your ideas away? What if they steal them? This is also almost a depressed way of thinking. Like, it's a scarcity way of thinking. Like that sort of person thinks, I'm only going to have one good idea in my life. Nobody better steal it because I'm never going to have this shot again. And I've had, because I share a lot of these ideas. I, I've. Many of my ideas have been stolen. In fact, I encourage people to steal my ideas. What am I going to do? 3,000 ideas a year? Like, actually execute them? Steal away. And as long as when you share ideas, it builds your network, people learn to trust you. People try your ideas, and maybe it works for them, or maybe they morph it into their own. You know, they combine it with their personality and morph it into their own thing. And I know I don't have to worry about someone stealing my ideas because tomorrow I'm going to have 10 more ideas. So I'm abundant with ideas as opposed to scarce with ideas.

And so for the person listening who's like, right, okay, tomorrow morning I want to start this practice. I want to do my 10 ideas. Maybe they don't have a waiter's pad, but maybe they have their own notebook or whatever. Can you just take us through? What's your setup? What does that routine actually look like? How long does it take you?

Yeah, great question. Usually I'll go to a cafe, but right now in Pandemic, I just do it at home. And I'll start off with reading. Because reading kind of, you just woke up, you're a little foggy. Reading sort of like, you know.

Greases the wheels a little bit in Your brain. And so I'll usually read a little bit of a good quality nonfiction book. Like, you know, take a book like Bold, for instance, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler that gives all sorts of ideas of industries that might be growing in the future and how people should be more optimistic than they generally are because look at the history of innovation and so on. So I might read a book like that. I'll read a book of high quality fiction, because high quality fiction is usually written by the best writers and I always like improving my writing. And then I might read a book about games, like, because that's been my whole life is like, you know, I love games. Like, so I might read about Scrabble or a history of Monopoly or a book about chess or a book about checkers just to kind of like get the puzzle side of my brain going. I find that to be a lot more interesting than solving pure math puzzles. And then I'll just. By then something will start happening in my brain, like, oh, this is interesting. And I'll just, I'll come up with a topic like, 10 reasons, 10 things I would do if I was creating an economic stimulus plan. Okay, has nothing to do with business, it has nothing to do with entrepreneurship, whatever, and. Or has nothing to do with writing a book. And then I'll just write them down. And again, I'll come up with seven pretty easily. Like, okay, let's give everybody fourteen hundred dollars. Let's forgive certain kinds of debt. Let's make sure the states that had the most cases of COVID get the most money. So I'll come up with seven pretty easily. And then the final three or four will be like.

It'S really hard. But the whole process of from putting my pen to paper and getting 10 ideas will be about 20 to 30 minutes, not so long, maybe 15 to 30 minutes. The reading itself, the reading beforehand might take like an hour or maybe a little longer, depending on what I'm reading. And then that's it. And then I start my day. Then I go and either start implementing the ideas or I start writing. Usually the idealist gives me an idea of an article to write. I'll write an article about these ideas.

So you talk about games I can't resist. What's your favorite game?

Well, chess is my favorite, but poker is close. And I have a lot of respect for Scrabble, checkers, backgammon, bridge, hearts, other card games. But. But the game Go, the Asian game Go, is the most difficult game in the world. More difficult than chess. But Chess, because it's kind of part of American culture, is my favorite. And then there was that show, the Queen's Gambit. It was about chess, a fictional story, and chess just sort of exploded in popularity. So I figured, okay, it's not completely. And again, half my book is about monetizing what you do. And so Chess.com had, like, literally about 60 million people sign up for it after the Queen's Gambit. You know, some obscenely huge number. There's 62 million members, and most of them signed up after this TV show. And right now, this second, there's over 300,000 games being played on Chess.com and that's only one of the many chess servers that are out there. So, you know, and a lot of people who are, again, not in the top 10 in the world, but let's say in the top 1%, which might mean they're in the top 10,000 in the world, they're streaming on Twitch, so. And they're making, you know, maybe up to between a half a million and a million a year. So part of getting good at chess, you always have to think about the field that you're in. So I've started streaming just to learn about that. I've never streamed before, so I've started doing that. And bit by bit, I could see, you know, my skills developing in streaming, which is not the same as developing skills in chess, but it is part of the skills of making a living at something.

And when we're talking about going back to ideas and how good the ideas need to be, because you had this comment earlier that the ideas aren't even necessarily good. And there's this wonderful part in the book where you talk about creating the room that nobody else is in. And I connected that to another piece in the book where you talked about the art of combining ideas and talents, such that the underlying individual ideas or talents might even not be that good on their own. But it's the combination which is unique, the intersection which creates, you know, the value. Can you give us an example of that?

Yeah, I mean, first. First thing, there's a couple of things to say there, and I'm sorry if I'm a little wordy sometimes, but let's say you and I both are professional tennis players, but we've never played a match. And let's say someone who's an amateur tennis player, they know how to play, they hit it around every couple of weeks, and that's it. They see you playing tennis, and they see me playing tennis. Let's say you're number one in the world and I'm number 1,000 in the world and you would crush me nine times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100. But because you're number one and I'm number 1,000, I'm like a great college level player. You're, you want, you just won Wimbledon. So. But the average person, if he saw me playing and he saw you playing, he wouldn't be able to tell that you're better. He, unless we're playing with each other where you're crushing me. But he wouldn't be able to tell. He's not going to clock the miles per hour of your serve. He's not going to see how you the spin on your forehand or your backhand because he's the average. He's one of the 2 billion people who's an average amateur tennis player. He's not going to know all the nuances. So it's not good enough to be 10% better or even 50% better than your competition. And there's always competition in everything. And this is a good thing like, but there's always a hierarchy no matter what field or industry you're in, whether you're a writer, tennis player, a businessman, whatever. And there's many examples in history where the worst product succeeded and not the better product. But people do recognize when it's the only. So let's say, you know, and we've seen this in tennis, I don't even play tennis. I'm just using this as an example. Say there are tennis players who, because of their personality, they stand out. Maybe they argue a little more with the ref, or maybe they dress in flashier clothes or they're outlandish in some way, or maybe they have like.

A weird two handed backhand that goes against all the rules of teaching tennis. They'll stand out and they become the only. And they're the ones who get the sponsorship deals and, and get noticed more. There's plenty of examples of people not in the top 10 who get more sponsorship deals than people in the top 10. It's true in basketball, it's true in tennis, and it's true in business. People, you know, there's a lot of factors other than whether you have the best product. But again, if you're the only, you're going to get known because not only will you be noticed, but in the intersection of skills that you're combining, you actually might be the best in the world. So I have a friend who was an. Or, yeah, was he traded bonds for J.P. morgan. He was a finance guy for 20 years. That was his whole career. But he loves sports. He's in his 40s. He's not going to be a professional athlete. But.

He decided I'm going to, during the pandemic, get free time. He said to himself, I always love sports. I've got free time. I'm going to just write up little stories about sports related to finance. Like, how do you value a baseball stadium? Why did the singer for the super bowl halftime not only not take any pay, but spend $7 million of his own money to produce a show? So every day, five days a week, he writes this story and he sends it out in a newsletter. Well, eight months after he starts this newsletter, he has 27,000 subscribers. He quit his job at JP Morgan. He's literally the best in the world for a writer of sports finance. And he's probably not the best sports writer in the world. He probably wasn't the best finance guy in the world. But at the intersection, he's the best in the world. I know a comedian who's from England, actually, if I remember his name correctly, is Chris Tyler. He's been in my podcast. He's a comedian. He's 27 years old, which is very young for a comedian to get stage time at a really good, high quality club. He is so good, he would get stage time at every club in the world. He'd probably even get a Netflix special if he. If he went for it. Why? Because he doesn't. He's a good comedian, but I wouldn't say he was the best. But ever since he was a little kid, he's just as a hobby, he was a freestyle rapper. So now in his act, he tells the audience, give me five random words and they'll give him. He did it in my podcast. We gave him like the Volcanoes of Mars, James Altucher, you know, Ethiopia. We just gave him like obscure things. And then he's. Then within seconds, he raps the most insanely good, funny, intellectual rap, using these phrases and weaving them together into one coherent story. Like, how does he do it? It's like incredible brain power or something. But it's because he's been doing it his whole life, practicing the skill. He combined them with comedy and now he's the best comedy rapper on the planet.

And one of the things that is obvious with both of those stories, so your friend in Bonds and with this comedian, is that at some point they had to just try, they had to experiment. And you talked about experimenting earlier as well. Yeah, it's like the next step right after you come up with your ideas. And I love how in the book you talk about how.

The only failure is not trying. And really it's just an experiment. Either then succeeds if you try or you learn something. Now, can you take us through the criteria for setting up a good experiment and also maybe a person or story that the average person can relate to? So not Thomas Edison, not Elon Musk.

Okay, so I have a friend of mine, let's call her Nancy. She comes to me with this idea that I thought was. I didn't really know how to evaluate. I didn't know if it was good or not, but it seemed okay. She's a videographer and like she makes. She video. Commercial. She makes commercials. And she had an idea of.

She had a way of automating.

Videotaping, like kind of a biography of a person who's just died. And she had a way to do software to automate the whole process. And so she was raising money, she was raising $2 million so she. She could hire software programmers, have them develop the product that she had in her head, and then she would sell it. So this is a horrible idea. So we don't know whether or not the idea is good. And. And people say ideas are nothing, executions, everything. But executions are execution. Ideas are really a subset of ideas. And you could be good at execution or bad at it. And if you haven't done it before, you're probably bad at execution. So I said to her, this seems to me like a bad idea for executing. I don't know about the business itself. I can't judge, but here's what we do. How about you find someone whose relative, whose father or mother just passed away, and why don't you do this your whole process that you want automated. Why don't you do it manually for them? Exactly. Every single thing you would automate, just do it manually and see A, if people like it, B, what the challenges are. C, you know, you learn maybe other things that might be necessary for this that you didn't realize before. And it's just an experience. There's no downside. At the very least, your friend gets a free video and loves you for it. And the upside is everybody loves this video. Maybe do it with two or three friends even. The upside is you find that this is a good business idea. And you know, the downside is you just learn something. You learn about your friends, families, and you learn another aspect of being a videographer and so on. So a Good experiment should, A, be cheap, it should cost you almost nothing or nothing, ideally. B, it should be very fast to do, otherwise you're wasting too much time to get it done. C, there should be little downside. I mean, the worst downside is you should learn something and maybe even learn some unexpected things. And the upside is, oh my gosh, you have this huge business out of it.

So.

So like, you know, I, at any given point, I'm doing like tons of experience, probably too many. But one time I was.

When I was six or seven years ago, I was trying to get better at stand up comedy and it's hard to get stage time when you're first starting. So I went on a subway and for two hours I went from subway car to subway car and performed to definitely a hostile audience. Like people on a New York City subway going home at rush hour. Do not want someone like me just telling jokes to them.

So that was an experiment in dealing with a potentially hostile audience. Also getting quicker to the laugh because people are coming and going, so you have to get to the lab very quickly.

And then the downside, there was no downside. The downside is, oh, people would not like me. Complete strangers would not like me. Oh, no, they. That would be the downside. That said, I was scared to death of that downside. So I was very nervous and. But then there was nuanced upsides. Like I started thinking, huh, this is a weird, this could be a weird format for a late night TV show where the sub telling jokes on a subway is like the monologue. Then I'm riding on a subway with, let's say, a celebrity and I interview them on the subway and we interact with the subway, other subway passengers. There's always people in the subway station, you know, busking with music, like playing garbage cans as drums or whatever. So I videotaped all of that and I had kind of a prototype of a late night TV show that its format is on a subway. And I pitched it to an agent. So my downside was that I actually invented a whole new concept for a late night TV show. And then I did another experiment which is put it all together in a video and pitched it to an agent who rejected it. But that's fine. That's why it costs nothing and took me very little time. And I learned more about what this agent likes.

Amazing.

And I have. And by the way, the downside is that you have a great story to tell about it.

So as you are right now.

Yeah.

What do you think holds people back from making These experiments, especially if they're doing as you suggest and they're minimizing the downside, then why aren't they doing the kind of Nike just do it mentality which you kind of talk about in the book?

Well, many things. One is it's scary. Like, I was scared. When you're doing an experiment, almost by definition you're doing. Not only are you doing something that you don't know, you have a theory, but you don't know if the theory is true or not. And so you just don't know what's going to happen. So it's a little scary, particularly when it involves something people are scared of, like interacting with other people and so on. And also people just don't have time. Like you said, you know, you spend a lot of time on social media, or not you. But people spend a lot of time on social media. They spend a lot of time watching tv. They spend, of course, you spend time at your job and it's very hard to find time, I think, and particularly if you're, you know, a lot of people are like low level, simmering, depressed. Like they've been, oh, I've been an accountant for 27 years, or a middle manager at Procter and Gamble for a billion years. They just like, are. They don't want to do. They want to just rest when they get home? They want to. They're working eight hours a day, or at least they're at the job eight hours a day and behind in a cubicle. They just don't want to do it. They're tired. So you have to really be excited about what you're doing to do experiments in it. You can't be low level. So, you know, so part of it also is to figure out what it is you're passionate about. And you can't think your way to passion. Like, I can't think to myself. You know, I'd really be, I really want to be a race car driver. I don't even drive, so it wouldn't. I would have to do it in order to get that dopamine rush to determine if I'm passionate about it. So you have to, like, try lots of things and read lots of things to see what you're passionate about, similar to writing down lots of ideas to get good at making ideas. You have to kind of try lots of possibilities to see which possibilities you might be good at and which possibilities you might love. By the way, it's important to love what you do because let's say you're a Writer, but you don't love it. You're doing it because you want to. You think it's interesting or whatever, then if you don't love it, part of your energy when you sit down to write is convincing yourself to write because it's a very boring activity. It's just typing on this keyboard. But if you love something, you can use that energy that would have been required to convince yourself to do it. You can use the energy now to write better and. Or to whatever it is you love to do it better. So that's why it's really all about conservation of energy and efficiency. That's why it's important to love what you do.

Amazing. And you have a great quote as well that relates to that, where you said, if you want to. If you're reading this book because you want to be at the top of your chosen passion, you want to make money doing it, and you want to reach the potential you knew you were meant to achieve. And then later in the book you say, and if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. So, you know, once again, it's pushing us to kind of break outside the norm, to think of new ideas, to generate new possibilities. So let's just play with that. Because you talk about idea calculus in the book where we can combine different ideas. So let's say that we're using Skip the Line. We're going to combine Skip the Line and the techniques in that book with educational reform. I'm just making something up. So using that book as a guide, which lens lessons would you start with? Education wise, with the children out there. And at what age would you start?

Well, any age. Oh, you mean what age would I start? What level of education?

Yeah.

Or what age am I?

No, like, where do you think? How young can we get these ideas going?

These ideas?

So I have one chapter in the book called Plus, Minus Equals. So the plus is find yourself a mentor or a virtual mentor, which could be YouTube videos or books or whatever, to learn what's the top echelons of this industry, what does it look like, and what can you learn from it? Then you have to find equals, people who are like you, they're interested in educational reform, and you're all at roughly the same level and you challenge each other and compare ideas and so on, and then you find a minus. So someone to teach about educational reform. Because if you can't explain something simply, then you don't truly understand it. So if I was going to. If I Was excited about education reform, which, by the way, I am kind of. I'm excited about.

I think high school and college are sort of. There's a lot of problems with it. And I would definitely reform those, maybe even going younger, But I would basically. So to some extent, I've done a little bit of this work, but I would basically either watch videos or read books about, well, what are people trying? What are the different styles of current education reform? What are experimental programs that are happening right now? And I really try to understand what are the problems, you know, and then I would join Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups about educational reform to find my equals. And then I would start writing articles to sort of explain, Here are the 10 most important issues in education reform. And I would see the feedback and response to see if I'm explaining it well. And then I would start breaking down what are the micro skills involved in education reform? So am I again, what is it different for different age groups? Is it about. One thing is curriculum, is the curriculum correct? The other thing is what's the role of recreation and educational reform? What is the role of. Of memory versus practice in educational reform? So there's various micro skills or components that we need to understand. And then I would start writing down the 10 ideas a day. And I'd start thinking of the spoken wheel, like, am I aiming to write a book about this? Am I aiming to start a new college or a new school? Am I aiming to write a newsletter to parents who want to reform their kids? Or am I writing a newsletter for educators? Or am I going to do a podcast or a course which I could sell for a lot of money to, say, the deans of colleges and. Or am I going to do coaching of deans or principals or whatever? And that's how I would start to go about it. And then actually coming up with ideas, I would do everything from come up with curriculum or like, here's an interesting idealist. I would start with how many things from my education from first grade through graduate school do I actually remember now.

You know, or better list is not remember. I don't remember anything from biology class or chemistry class. I remember a few things from English class. I vaguely remember history class. And it's interesting, most people think they remember a lot from history class. But I will challenge anybody with the most simple questions by history, nobody will know the answers. Like, we forget almost everything. If we had to memorize something for a test, we forget it immediately after the test. And there's a brain science research on this. You Pretty much remember what you love because then it cements the.

Memories in your brain. There's something called myelin in the brain which puts sheaths around the connections between neurons or synapses, so that they're firmer memories. And you build those sheaths when you. When you think about something a lot because you love it. So, you know, most people don't love, you know, the third studying the 700 AD so they don't remember that Charlemagne the king was born in 754 A.D. i asked people, oh, you majored in European studies at Harvard. Okay, when was Charlemagne born? The most important king in Europe. European history unified all of Europe in 7 in like 780 AD. And people who majored in this will say, oh, I think like 1380 or whatever. Nobody knows the answer within 500 years.

Amazing. James, this has been such a enlightening conversation. Really love all of your work.

Thank you so much, Eric. I really appreciate it. I'm really happy you invited me on. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

And again, for everyone watching and or listening, the book is Skip the Line by James Altucher. Highly recommend it. He's got over 20 books. I think he said 25 now, so.

Most of them bad. But I will say I've written maybe two or three that I. That I would recommend.

James, this being one of them, to take us home. Can you. Can we just end with the following? I love things that kind of go against the grain or that make you think, huh? I haven't thought about it that way.

So.

So you talk about towards the end of the book, over promise and over deliver. Can you leave us with something that you would like to. Out of all the ideas you're working on that you'd like to right now, make a statement with regards to over promising and over delivering?

Well, okay. I am in the process of setting up a new business. It's the first one I've done in a while and I'm very excited about it. Right now you and I are doing a podcast and we're using Zoom as a software. And Zoom is great software. I mean, 700 million people use it, but it's not really good for podcasts. And the reason, one of the reasons is the video quality is so poor that if you post this video on YouTube, the YouTube algorithm will downplay it because the video quality is not that good. Second, the audio quality is not that good. If you had a bad Internet connection, we might be missing part of the conversation. Now, there's ways to correct both of these problems, but it's not necessary for zoom to do it because they did not expect podcasters to be using it or performances to happen on it. They thought it was good for office meetings where you don't need to do that stuff. So I'm creating and then so there are competitors that do some degree of what I just said, but I'm creating.

Kind of Zoom like software for podcasters that have all the qualities I just mentioned. And then the over promise comes in in that I'm throwing in so many great qualities that I would use as a podcaster. Like for instance, what if you could do live real time audio engineering in the software so I could just drop in ads at the appropriate points without having to actually hire an audio engineer for $1,000 to put the ads in? Or.

What if I could have some social media so anybody using the software can do discovery? Is there any public live podcast happening right now involving race car drivers? And it'll show me all the podcasts happening this moment that I'm allowed to join as an audience member, not as a participant, but as an audience member like an Instagram Live and watch these in real time. So I have a bunch of I have another feature called Make Book. It's a button that will basically automatically make a transcript of the podcast and turn it into a book that you could then or a first draft of a book that you could then edit and publish. And so that's my over promise and over deliver is that I'm going to I'm almost done with this software hopefully within the next month or so. And by the way, steal the idea if you want. I've been programming this for a year, so catch up with me and let's see what happens.

Awesome, James. Thank you so much everyone. Again, once again, skip the line. Check it out. James Altucher can also check out his website, jamesaltucher.com and yeah, thanks James. Really appreciate your wisdom, your opinions and the laughs along the way.

Thanks Eric. I appreciate it. It's a great podcast.

Sam.