#115: The KEY To Skipping the Line By WORKING Your Idea Muscles with James Altucher

A lot of people feel their ideas are very precious. And so if they have an idea that's good, they hold onto it. This is my idea. I don't want anybody to steal it. And in a weird way, even though they think they have a good idea that can make them a lot of money, for instance, it's a very scarcity way to think. It's not an abundant way to think. The abundant way to think is I have a good idea, but that's because I always have good ideas. Not all my ideas are good. Most of them are bad. But if I keep practicing writing down ideas, I will have more and more good ideas. I don't care if anyone steals my ideas. If someone steals my idea and does it power to them, they're not the sort of person I want to deal with, but at least I know. And they were probably better suited to the idea than me anyway, because they did it faster than I did it.

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Fasten your seatbelts. I'm ready for my close up.

Hi, and welcome back. I'm sorry. So excited today. Our guest is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He's achieved the rank of chess master, which is insane. And he's the author of Wall Street Journal's bestselling book, choose yourself. He started 20 companies, 17 of which have failed. But he's learned a lot along the way, and lucky for us, he's included it all in Skip the Line, his new book. James Altucher. Thank you so much for being here today.

Heather, thanks for inviting me on your podcast. This is great.

Oh, my gosh, it's so exciting to have you back. So the first thing I have to say to you, you've written 20 freaking books. You have books that have achieved the pinnacle of success. Why in the world did you do this to yourself and write another book?

Well, first off, I've been writing every single day since 1990, and I would always, even back then I was in graduate school for computer science. I got thrown out of graduate school because all I would do was right. And back then I wanted to write fiction. I wrote all these novels that never got published, but that was sort of paying the price a little bit. And then I started writing professionally about 10 or 12 years later, and I've never stopped. And basically every time I get an idea for a book, I write it.

It's amazing.

So another way of putting it, though, is I've only had like 20 ideas for books. You should probably have a lot more. But I mean, Isaac Asimov wrote 570 books.

That's sort of an aggressive expectation to hold, in my humble opinion. I'm very impressed. And I'll tell you, first of all, James, your storytelling ability, in my opinion, is beautiful in this book. And it made it so enjoyable. And I'm so curious from a reader perspective, that's what really draws me into books, is the author's ability to storytell. Yours is masterful in this book. But one of the things that I like that you do is it's not linear. And I find linear can be boring. But I like that, you know, when you open the book, you take us right into an incident in the halls of hbo and then suddenly we're bouncing forward to New York City when you're struggling. I just. I love that there's so much happening in the book that it keeps me engaged. It's very hard to put down. Was that done deliberately?

Well, I think, you know, ultimately the best books, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, whether it's science or history, or totally academic, like a book about some research and chemistry, it should always tell a story and an overarching story that unites the entire book. And then each chapter should also be a story. And you pick the story that best fits the concepts or chapter, you know, you're trying to present. For fiction, you know, when you make a decision to do it non chronological, that also has to structurally be part of the story. So, for instance, have you ever seen the movie Arrival? This linguist has to communicate with these aliens and won all sorts of awards. It was, I guess, a couple years ago. Anyway, the structure of the movie itself, there was a lot of stuff that was in and that was out of chronological order, but that aspect was deliberately part of the story. The fact that we're reviewing it out of chronological order. So I don't like to play structurally unless it's part of the structure of the book. So with this book, I took stories out of order because sometimes the concepts, the best stories to describe those concepts wouldn't necessarily be in chronological order. You ever see Lawrence of Arabia? The movie Lawrence of Arabia?

Yes.

So the desert. Some people say that movie's boring, but I love the fact that parts of the movie are boring because walking across the desert is boring. And they would just show Lawrence and his buddies just dredging across the desert slowly in the hot sun. And you really feel it because it's so slow and in today's. Day and age that would be considered boring. But I love the fact that it was structurally part of the intent of the movie because the desert itself is boring. So that's a long answer to your thing. But I love when writing takes chances and if it does so for you have to understand what the reason is.

Well, Skip the Line is not boring. I'd like to come in hot and just say that right away.

Thank you.

Really, it's so engaging and I'm not an avid reader right. So I'm definitely someone who skims more. But again, I'll just go back to the stories are so powerful here and then when I was a couple chapters in the lessons that you start teaching here's the thing, you open the book around the concept that really we're all everyone universally is in this situation where we're longing for some kind of certainty, we're longing for some kind of normalcy. And when there are so many people out looking for a job, Skip the Line is really, in my opinion, the tactics, tips and strategies that you personally have used and fine tuned to help you create success from moments when you were out of work or looking constantly for certainty.

Yeah, like I always hate those books that they're like here's my 10 step system for being rich and famous and successful and happy. And you don't know if they had to go through this. I like to know that the author has also had the problems he's trying to solve in the book because if you have those problems, it means you put a lot of time and energy into figuring out how to solve your own problems. And you know, too many books are like, oh, this academic research says that if you cross your legs at the same time as this other person, you'll be able to persuade them. And none of that stuff's ever worked for me. So. So I wanted to figure out I've changed interests many times in my life, as I'm sure you have as well. I've changed careers at least six or seven times. I've completely changed careers. Even in the beginning of this podcast I said I was going to graduate school in computer science. And then I started writing every day and I can't help it. Like when I change interests, I like to do Money is not a factor at first. I like to do what I love doing. And then of course you have to monetize it so that you can do this all the time instead of working by day as an accountant. But then doing what you love on the weekends if you have time and so I've done this so many times, and every single time people have told me, james, you can't do that. You've already put so much time into this, or you haven't paid your dues yet, or you haven't, you know, I wanted to be a professional investor. At one point, someone said, I asked the guy who worked at a bank, you think I could work as a trader or a day trader? He said he looked at me, sort of felt sorry for me. And he was like, maybe you should get an mba. Then you start off working at a bank and then you start working at a hedge fund, a small hedge fund, then maybe a bigger hedge fund. And then when I started doing stand up comedy, all the comedians were like, hey, if you don't, you know, don't think there's anything easy here. And it wasn't easy, I should add. But this one guy said, don't think you can skip the line. Like, you have to pay your dues, got to go to open mics, and then you go to the smaller clubs and you become friendly with the bookers. And maybe after 10 years, 12 years, you could, you know, start finding your voice. And I'm like, finding my voice. I'm 50 over 50 years old. Like, I'm not going to. Or at the time I was about 47, but I'm not going to spend 20 years trying to figure this out. Since then, I've toured all over the world. And this is just in the past few years. So, you know, people will always tell you you can't do it. But the goal of Skip the Line was that the book is I'm going to write all the stories of how I got good at each different skill that I switched to and then how, what techniques I used to then monetize so that I can make a living doing what I love doing. And I had to think back, like, every single time I had changed interests, I did go through kind of the same set of procedures. It's just I never wrote it down before. I never put labels to these techniques. And doing that really allowed me to see what I did. And now I'm kind of learning other skills using the skip the line techniques.

The techniques are so solid. I love how you open the book, though, where you're running down the hall at HBO to walk into your boss's boss's boss's boss's office, the CEO, to share an idea, and you're told right away you can't do that.

Yeah, I ran into this woman from the marketing department I worked in the IT department, which. Which is the computer department, which was so low on the. My title was junior systems analyst, something like that. I was the lowest person on the. On the totem pole you could possibly be. And nobody cared about the IT department. We were the only department in another building than the rest of hbo. So I'm going to the HBO building. I run into someone from the marketing department, and she's like, where are you going? I said, I'm going to the CEO, Jeff, to tell him this idea I have. And she was like, you can't do that. You got to go to your boss, and you can't just go over his head. And Jeff Yukas, who was the CEO of HBO then he became a really great CEO of Time Warner, for CEO of Time Warner for over 20 years. But that was the office I was going to. So I acknowledge that I'm not supposed to be doing that, but I didn't think my boss in the IT department would give me approval for the idea that I had. So I went to Jeff's office. I sort of snuck past the secretary, and he looks at me. He's like, who are you? And I said, listen, I'm building the HBO website. Just like HBO has original TV shows. Maybe we could be the first to have original web shows. This was 1995. And he's like, just do whatever, man. It's your thing. It's your generation. And so I went back to my boss in the IT department. I said, jeff Yuka said I should do this. And then I created original web shows for the HBO website and even shot an idea as they gave me money. HBO documentaries, gave me money to shoot it as a pilot, which I did. So that's how you change your life, is when you do these experiments, and there's nothing really you can't do. I mean, yes, you can't fly or turn invisible, but in terms of things like that, like, I can't see another human being and tell them my idea. Of course I could do that. If they were to fire me for that, like, it wouldn't be the right job for me. And with everything. With every single topic, someone's always told me, you can't do that.

So two things I want to highlight that you did. One, you didn't ask for permission from someone who couldn't tell you yes, because we know that your boss could have told you no very easily, but he actually couldn't greenlight it. He'd have to get approval from higher up on the food chain. And that's really smart.

And if he said no and then I did it, then I might have been fired. At least I could claim ignorance if someone got upset. But why would anyone get upset? That's the thing. But if I asked for permission and he said no and then I did it, then he would have been upset that I didn't listen to him. And then you should listen to your boss. You're being paid to listen to him. So you know, and then the idea never would have happened. What ended up happening was other companies loved the websites I was doing and they really stood out because they had this original content on it. And other companies started asking me, hey, can you do our website? And so I started doing, in my free time, I started doing other companies websites. During this time I did americanexpress.com you remember, nobody had websites then. So I did the first American Express.com I did Time Warner.com, conEdison.com, which was the big utility company in that area. And then I started a company that was doing websites and I sold it a few years later and made a lot of money, but then went broke two years after that.

You highlight the struggle. The struggle part in your book is so real. And I really identify it when you speak about you specifically say, I had to provide for my family. The panic, the sheer panic that you went through in those moments when you had lost everything again. How did you fight through that fear? And how can other people fight through that fear?

Look, last year 55 million people filed for unemployment insurance. That's a really big number. That's, you know, there's a little over 120 million people working. It's almost 50% of America of the United States filed for unemployment insurance. There was a lot of suffering last year on top of the horrible pandemic and all that. And nobody likes to go to bed at night not knowing how they're going to support their family. I would wake up in the middle of the night and I just wouldn't be my. There would be a thousand thoughts in my head. I would be adding up numbers, subtracting them, like how am I going to survive this month, the next six months, the next year got these two little babies and I didn't know what to do. I could have done anything. And I'm glad I didn't do the worst things you could do. And a lot of things sort of helped. I was depressed for a while, but one time, I don't know why I did this, I went into a restaurant supply store just Kind of wandered in. I took lots of walks at the time because I had nothing else to do. And I bought a box of waiter's pads, 100 waiters pads for $10. So 10 cents a pad. And I started taking with me every morning a waiter's pad. And I would write down ten ideas a day. And it's sort of like the ideas. The creativity is sort of like a muscle. And if you don't exercise a muscle, what happens? It atrophies. Like, if you don't walk for two or three weeks, you'll have trouble walking. You'll need physical therapy to walk, perhaps. And it's the same thing with creativity. A lot of people think, oh, when I have ideas, they hit me like lightning. It's like inspirational. But that's not how creativity works. Creativity, you have to be kind of like your antenna has to be constantly tuned to pick up the stuff that's going around. And the way I did that was by exercising the creativity muscle. I would write down 10 ideas a day. Could be ideas about anything. 10 ideas for books to write, 10 ideas of businesses to start. 10 ideas that Google should do. You know, 10 ideas that would have made Star wars better. I don't know. It could be anything. It could be nonsense. 10, the 10 musical instruments that demonstrate the history of the world could be just random ideas. And the point is that they're not good ideas because you can't have 3650 good ideas a year. But to do this every day, after just a few weeks, you will actually feel different. Like for me, I'll tell you how I felt. After about three weeks, I felt happier. For the first time in like a year and a half, I felt like I could smile and laugh at things again. And then I started having what I consider some good ideas. And I would say these ideas changed my life. Like every time my life has drastically changed, it's because of one idea out of maybe hundreds or thousands that I wrote down on my idea pad 100% of the time. Every big change in my life has happened because of that. And every small change, by the way.

So I love the idea and you had actually taught me about this before you wrote the book. I remember when we were in New York, you shared that idea with me, which does work because it is a discipline, it is a habit and a routine you need to get into. But finding out which idea to pursue and how to conspire to make it a reality is something you talk about in the book. I'd love you to Share a little bit about that.

Yeah. So this is where skip the line kicks in, which is that a lot of times you might like to do something, but first you need the skills to do it. And you don't need to be the best in the world at a skill to make money from it. To make a lot of money from it. There's that kind of theory that, oh, if you practice something for 10,000 hours, you'll be the best in the world at it. I don't know if that theory is true, but to make money at something, you just need to be. You need to be in the top 1 or 2%, which is a much bigger number than you think, because let's say you're trying to be the good at tennis. Well, to be number one in the world is really hard, but there's maybe 30 million people who play tennis, so you just have to be in the top 300,000 and you're good enough to make money at tennis. I'm just, I just picked a random example. I don't play tennis. But, you know, it's also another interesting thing is people think, oh, no, it's only good if I'm the best or if I'm in the top 10 or whatever. If you think about it, it's really hard to tell. You can't tell even which products are better than which other products. Like, people always ask me, how is this restaurant? How was this restaurant? Most restaurants are just the same as each other. To me, I can't tell which restaurant's better. If you watch two people playing tennis, let's say one of them was the number one tennis player in the world, and let's say the other match was being played by two people who were in the top, who were number ranked 200th in the world, 200th and 201. You would not be able to tell which of those four people were in the two tennis courts, were the best tennis players. Even though one is clearly number one, the other is number 200. People just can't tell the difference between people, but better to be the only than the better. So if you have some features that stand out, that make you unique, or whether it's as a writer or a businessman or a product or an investor, that is what people could tell. If you apply for college and the admissions counselor, everybody just has a. Everybody has a 4.0 GPA, did charity work, did some clubs, did some sports. I can't tell who's. Who's better or not. They all have the same SAT scores. Or roughly the same. You can't tell who's better. One person has a higher SAT score, the other person has more extracurriculars. Who could tell? So as an example. So with my daughter, a year ago or more than a year ago, she applied to a bunch of schools. But it was really hard getting into schools. Everybody from the New York City area was applying to every single school. So I suggested why not take a gap year and let's try different unique things to see what you're interested in. So one of the things is we enrolled her in a race car driving school and she got her race car driving license and she even conducted a real car race. She's going like over 200 miles an hour. And, and, and now she's the only. So she applied. She got into every college. She applied to this this year because this was what her essay was about and this is what her application was about. So. So it's always good to be the only at something. I just, I throw this in there as advice when you want to switch passions. Figure out. I have a chapter called who Are youe? Why Are youe? Why Now? Why would you be good at whatever it is you're interested in? You know, what do you believe in life? What do you. What do you want to accomplish in life? What are your values? They don't have to stay the same. They could be different. But you need to figure out how your passion fits in with your values and your code of living. And then why now? Why is now the best time to do this skill? To provide some service, to provide some product? When I was interested in investing, I had to ask this because I had never invested before. In fact, I had gone broke investing. And so I had to get good at it, which was difficult. And I had to then figure out how to monetize it. So investing, even if you make money investing, you still have to either work for someone or run a hedge fund or whatever to make real, significant money. And who was I? I was someone who was very good at games and computers and math. And so I already had built a business, so I understood business. And I liked the game like aspect of investing. Why am I? Well, I like to educate people. And I knew that if I was a good investor, I would write books about it, which is what I ended up doing. And why now? Well, I was writing software to model. This is how I got good. After I lost everything, I wrote software to take every piece of market data since World War II and create patterns for me that were statistically significant. And I would trade along those patterns. So it took my emotions out of the game and that's how I got better at investing. That was my skip the line on investing and it was unique then. Not a lot of people were doing that. That was my why now. So that was an example with investing.

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And it definitely paid off for you. The example that I love that you used in the story was the Dick Fosbury mediocre high jumper and how he decided to do things a little differently.

Yeah, so this guy, he literally was like a mediocre high jumper. So the high jump is when you, you run and jump over this bar. It's an Olympic sport. And I don't even know if he was the best guy on his high school team. And he shows his coach, hey, I'm going to try. I have a problem. My legs are really long and when I run and jump I put shoot the legs forward and try to legs go over the bar first, which is how everybody did it then. But my legs would always hit the bar. This is what he's saying to his coach. And the coach is like, yeah, that's what's proven over the past 100 years to work the best. I can't help you. Maybe you need a different sport. So he said, let me, I'm just going to try something. And so he did an experiment. And I really encourage people in this book to try experiments so they learn something unique about the field that they're in. So he tried flipping backwards over the bar. Well, something like two years later, he won the gold in the Olympics doing this. Like that. One thing allowed him to be the best high jumper in the world up to that point. And people still do the job that he suggested in the 60s. So there's tons of stories like that. But the point is, you have to have a passion to find things that are unique. You have to experiment so that you have a unique voice. Like if you write a book and it's exactly like 50 shades of gray, no one's going to read your book. They're going to just read 50 Shades of Gray instead. So you need to have something that makes your product or book or yourself, your voice, unique in whatever it is you do. And you need to learn all the micro skills. So everybody thinks investing is a skill. It's not. Investing is like a basket of a bunch of micro skills. There's value investing, growth investing, there's the psychology of investing. There's money management skills, which is very difficult. There's understanding how to read, you know, earnings reports, there's understanding, you know, computer stuff. So with comedy, the micro skills are, there's one liners, there's humor, there's storytelling, there's likability, there's crowd work, there's stage work, and on and on. So everything that's worthwhile learning is really just a collection of micro skills. So you start off skipping the line by figuring out which micro skills will help you the most at first. So, you know, these are parts of the inspirations for the book.

Now that you brought up comedy. And I of course followed your standup comedy career. I like that you include in the book how you tried and tested, experimented as you talk about, with a different angle for your standup comedy.

Yeah. So you can't go on stage when you're first starting out. It is hard to go on stage every night because nobody knows who you are. Not only did I want to get time to practice in front of an audience, I wanted time to practice in front of a hostile audience. Because if the audience loves you, comedy, stand up comedy is easy, but when the audience doesn't know you or is, or worse, doesn't like you, you've got to win them over. So I went on a new, and I did this a couple times, but this was an experiment. I wanted to see if this would work. I went on a New York City subway at rush hour and every stop I switched cars. And then I would start doing standup. And believe me, that is a hostile Audience like people just going home on the New York City subway during rush hour. They're nice people, but they're not nice to me if I'm just standing in front of them telling bad jokes. But I did it, and it was a lot of fun. And I practiced my one liners. I practiced dealing with a hostile audience. I feel I did win them over in many of the subway cars. And, you know, and I got to practice just doing it. And stuff like that is insanely valuable. Now, the components of an experiment are you have a theory about something that you want to see if it'll make you better at a certain skill. And it should have very little downside. It should be cheap, it should be very easy to do, and it should have enormous upside. And this, first off, it was the price of a subway token. It was really easy to just do, although I was scared to death I wasn't going to do it. When I got on the subway, I told my friend who was videotaping it, forget it, I'm not gonna do it. But then as soon as she turned on the video camera, I started doing it. So that's what convinced me to do it. And the upside was enormous in that I got better at comedy. And then I had an idea. This was on my idea list the next day. It felt like the monologue. It felt like doing the monologue of a late night TV show. So what are the other components of a late night TV show? Well, it has a musical guest and some celebrity guests. So I found a musical guest by finding some guy in the subway who plays the garbage cans like drums. And I videotaped that. And then I had a friend of mine who had just written a book come on the subway with me. And I interviewed him on the subway, and then we interacted with the audience. And I put together a little pretend late night show on the subway, sent it to an agent who said, nah, not good for me, and that's fine. But my upside was that could have been something and I still could pitch it around. I really didn't give it much of a shot. But not that obsessed with the idea. But the upside could be enormous on all these things. And there's again, no downside. And at the very least, you get a good story out of it.

I like that you just brought up that you weren't that obsessed with that idea, so you let it go after one. No. And that reminds me of a story in the book. I don't remember the specifics. I'm sure you will. But when you were suggesting to a friend of yours, okay, this is a low cost way for you to experiment and test this idea. And, and the person ended up not moving forward and even doing it, they lost interest.

Yeah. So my friend had an idea for a software product for a business. Now she is a videographer. She produces a lot of TV commercials. And so she had a, it was a video based idea where the software would help create the video in very specific situations. And so I'm not revealing her my ideas, I always reveal, but her idea I won't, I won't reveal, but she wanted to raise $2 million. And I said, what do you need $2 million for? And she said, well, it's probably going to cost a million dollars to hire all the software people and then it's going to take six months to a year to make the product and then I'll have to do marketing and sales. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It seems to me that this idea, it could be a good idea, but maybe it's not. We don't know yet. But you could do this manually at first. Call up four of your friends who are going through this specific situation that her business was about and see if you could do this manually. You'll do it for free. And that's an experiment. And if you, while doing it, you'll figure out nuances that maybe you didn't think of, which are good to know before you start paying someone to do the software for it. And you'll see how excited your friends are with the final product. If they're willing to give you a great testimonial and they love it and everybody's raving about it, then you know you've got a good idea. If they don't talk about it or don't even like it or don't think about it, then you probably don't have a good idea. Well, she probably didn't have a good idea and so she moved on to something else. But that's, that's an example. It's good to experiment with anything, just to kind of test the waters a little bit, just to see, to validate an idea.

And the ways that you lay it out in the book, they're so simplistic and manageable. Like you said, it's not high investment, it's low risk ways to exercise and experiment the idea as some type of.

A test, you know. Also I want to say, I say that I was not obsessed with the idea. A lot of people feel their ideas are very precious and so if they have an idea that's good, they hold onto it. This is my idea. I don't want anybody to steal it. And in a weird way, even though they think they have a good idea that can make them a lot of money, for instance, it's a very scarcity way to think. It's not an abundant way to think. The abundant way to think is I have a good idea, but that's because I always have good ideas. Not all my ideas are good, most of them are bad. But if I keep practicing writing down ideas, I will have more and more good ideas. I don't care if anyone steals my ideas. If someone steals my idea and does it power to them, they're not the sort of person I want to deal with, but at least I know. And they were probably better suited to the idea than me anyway, because they did it faster than I did it. And I'm abundant with ideas anyway. Maybe they aren't. And so being able to share ideas and not worry about whether people are stealing it is an abundant way to think. And it's very important to have that abundance mindset, because that creates opportunities. I'll give you an example. I heard this interview being done by the radio host Charlamagne Tha God. And he's like a music radio host. Maybe he's got 5 to 10 million listeners a day. And this was during the Black Lives Matter protest when they first started last May. And he was interviewing Joe Biden, and he wasn't quite satisfied with all the answers. And he said to Biden, we have Questions. So that got me thinking that question title, we have Questions. So I wrote down 10 questions Charlemagne could have asked Joe Biden. And I said, so I sent him the ideas, the questions, and I said, you should write a book called we have Questions and ask these questions and find out the answers, because these are questions I have, like, I don't know the answers to these questions. And he's like. He wrote back right away. He says, james, this is great. Can you work on it with me? And I said, no, no, no, this is all for you. You do this book. This would be great if you did this book. And gradually, though, I was helping him enough and we were fleshing out the questions and the outline. Charlemagne and I just released, actually an audiobook. It's audiobook only, called We Got Answers, and it's one of the top selling audiobooks on Audible right now.

Oh, my gosh, that's. And it all stemmed from you giving you sharing your idea.

Yeah. And the questions I asked as well. So I did a lot of research for each question, but that was just for me exercising my idea muscle. And then I just wanted him to either write it or not write it. It was up to him. Like another time I wrote to Amazon and I kind of just cold wrote. I just wrote to whoever was in charge of the self publishing division and this was a really long time ago, like maybe somewhere between 2012 and 2014. And I had 10 ideas for how Amazon can improve their self publishing because at the time I was experimenting with self publishing. Some books Skip the Line was mainstream published, but Choose Yourself for instance was self published and very successfully. And so I had ideas for Amazon and I sent it randomly to Amazon. They wrote back and said this is great, let us know if you're ever in Seattle, we'd love to show you what we're working on. And I wrote back and said, well, it just so happens I'm going to be in Seattle next week, can I stop by? And they said of course, we'll spend the whole day, we'll show you each of the groups, we'll show you what they're working on and we'd love your feedback. I had never been in Seattle in my life and I was never planning on going to Seattle. But when they said that of course I bought a ticket to Amazon and I flew out to Seattle and I had a great day with Amazon which has helped me in many future endeavors like when I have problems with my books on Amazon for instance.

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You took the chance though and you went for it. You capitalized, you saw an opportunity, you converted in the moment. So kudos to you. I want to share a scarcity mindset that I employed in my life that was a loss to your point. Instead of sharing ideas and coming from a place of abundance, people had said to me with my first book this should be a movie and I got so obsessed with the idea that I didn't want anyone else. I wanted to hold it and protect it and meet with lawyers and talk to lawyers and only put out bits of ideas to people but not share the whole concept and idea with the feedback I've been hearing from people and it went nowhere and nothing ever happened and inevitably I just moved on and began working on Other projects. But as I'm listening to you speak, and especially the idea with Charlemagne, you know, had I instead handed it to somebody and said, I love this idea, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. Is there a way we collaboratively work on something like this? We could be having a very different conversation right now.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny you said that story, because a few weeks ago I had an idea and I was telling some people about it and they thought it was a really good idea and they were excited to help me with it. And they're like, okay, what do we do first? Should we get a trademark? Should we get. We gotta copyright everything and copyright the idea. And I'm like, what? We don't even know. Let's just start it. Let's just start doing it and we'll see. We will see. There are some companies I've built and then sold where I didn't even incorporate until like the day before I sold the company. Now, anybody who knows anything about finance would know that's probably not a good idea. I'm not really that good at personal finance. I was just collecting the money in my own account. And then before I sold the company, though, I had to make. Legally make a company. So some things you can wait till the last minute and other. But the most important thing is just being able to validate and test out and experiment with the idea to try things also. Like your idea for a movie. Like I've had ideas for TV shows. I just tell people what the ideas are and then if somebody likes it, they're not going to steal it. Sometimes they will steal it, by the way. But my best idea is one time I sent a really good idea to an agent and he was like the main reality TV agent in Hollywood. He loved the idea and good thing I shared it with him because it was a very simple idea. He could have given it to anyone else and they could have done it. And we ended up pitching it to about nine different networks. And by the way, all the networks rejected it. But I learned a lot going from meeting to meeting with this guy who's one of the number one agents in Hollywood. So that was my downside was I learned a lot from a guy who was a world expert at something. And I'm now using the exact same idea, but doing it more in like a podcast type format.

It's such a win. I'm completely embracing this concept now. Will you share a little bit around? There's a big strategy around idea calculus. And if you could Give us some insight into how that works.

So this came about because a lot of ideas are fine, but they work best when combined with other ideas. So, for instance, I'll take a very simple example, which is simple to me. This is stand up comedy. I know this guy who is a very young comedian. He's in his 20s, which is too young to be kind of famous from comedy. But ever since he was a little kid, not only did he love comedy, but he loved rap. So he got so good at what's called freestyle rapping that anybody could just give him a bunch of words. Within seconds, he will come up with this ridiculously good, very smart rap that includes all the words that everybody just said, no matter what they were. So when he was doing my podcast, for instance, we all threw out words. Like we threw out the volcanoes on Mars, the Brazilian rainforest, you know, some obscure thing from the Philippines, the James Altucher show, and maybe one or two other words. And he thought about it for about three seconds and he said, okay, turn on the beat. The beat started and he rapped everything. And he wrapped so many details, it's almost like he was like a Jeopardy contestant. Like he knew all the trivia about everything. And so that was what I call idea sex. Or in that chapter, it's idea addition, where you combine two ideas with each other. Or maybe that one was multiple idea multiplication. But the main word phrase I use for that is idea sex. Now, idea multiplication might be. Okay, let's say I'm Amazon and I'm Jeff Bezos. My first idea is to make a bookstore, an online bookstore, E commerce. And then let's say it works. Okay, idea addition is. Let's just add to the idea. Or I don't know, I'm getting addition and multiplication confused.

But no, multiplication is the Amazon Books example. That's exactly the right thing.

Oh, yeah, you're right. You're right. Yeah, so you're exactly right. So, okay, now I have my bookstore. Now I'm going to do the electronics store and the clothing store and the food store and the baby toy store and on and on. So that's idea multiplication. Now what if Jeff Bezos then says to himself, hmm, I've got this great infrastructure where I'm just making stores store after store after store. And now it's super cheap for me to make stores. What about if I sell that service to people? So this is idea exponentials, where you kind of go meta on the idea. So now he's selling the infrastructure to make a store. And so that's why? There's the Amazon Sellers program. Anyone could set up their store on Amazon.

And.

And then he did idea exponentials again. He's like, well, we're using tons of computers to store everyone's products and data and logistics and all the customers data and so on. So how about I just offer our entire infrastructure to every corporation? So now Amazon Web Services the most. It's like 20% of Amazon's profits now is that kind of meta. Meta idea. So that's idea exponentials and on and on. There's. And it helps to always think in terms of these different types of ideas, whether it's idea sex or idea multiplication or idea division. For instance, you and I have podcasts, and we've had podcasts for a while. But when people are starting podcasts right now, I tell them to use a form of idea division. What do you want to do the podcast about? Is it business? Okay, now let's divide once. What niche in business? Okay, it's going to be about marketing. Okay, let's divide again, what niche within marketing? Okay, it's gonna be about digital marketing. You're gonna interview all the best digital marketers and use case studies of really great digital marketing campaigns and give specific techniques about what will work. That's a podcast. So you idea divide twice to find the right niche for your podcast. Because there's so many out there, you have to. You have to niche down twice to be something special, to be the only. So that's an example of idea division.

So I want to highlight the idea sex because I know everybody heard it, but I don't know if they've really grasped it. And I like the example that you use with the cell phone merging with an iPad.

Yeah, the iPhone is basically when Steve Jobs released the iPhone. It's 99.9% a phone. That's what it is. It has all the same types of chips and technical specifications of any phone on the planet. But he combined that with, basically he was at the time selling the ipod, which is. Was the music. And you could watch shows on it, but you could listen to, you know, millions of songs. He combined the ipod and the phone to create the iPhone. That was a great example of idea sex. And a lot of people thought it was a bad idea. I remember talking to one guy who was a Wall street guy who said, oh, he's going to sell none of these. Nobody wants this. And of course he sold. You know, it's billions. I don't know how many he sold, but. Or even, you know, think about Star Wars. Star wars is the genre of a western combined with some aspects of science fiction, combined with the story of Jesus. Really, it's almost a biblical story. So there's lots of idea sex that goes into almost every product we know about. What's Facebook? It is the Facebook of Harvard, which was a physical book where they had the pictures and profile of every student combined with a dating service. I mean, basically, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook because initially he wanted to find girls to date. So Facebook was a product of IdeasX.

Well, let's. Let's get to a little bit around the monetization strategies that you share in this book, because I feel like it's a really powerful and important part of the book. And I specifically like the wheel and spoke portion.

Yeah, the spoken wheel thing is very important. And it's really important when you're looking to monetize something. A you don't want to do it too quickly because you want to first master the skills and master the domain that you're working in. Like, really understand what is the field. There's the skills and then there's the domain. So I might have a skill to be a good writer, but if I don't also master the domain, I'll get nowhere. So the domain is, who are the publishers? Who are the agents? How does the book get published? How does the book get edited? What's the process of this whole thing? Who. Who gets a big advance? Who gets a small advance, what genres do. So that's the domain, and you have to understand all of that as well. Same thing with every skill. But then it's very important to ask. Well, a lot of people are fixed to only one. They could only make money in one way. So I was talking to somebody recently about restaurants. He had been a waiter and he'd worked in the kitchen. He'd been a host. And he had all these great ideas of how to improve almost every restaurant out there. And they were fascinating. Like, since speaking to them, every restaurant I go into, I could see very quickly what's going right and what's going wrong. And of course, I own part of a restaurant in New York City. So this is a topic that interests me. And then I said, so what are you. What are you going to do with all this information? Like, you have a great, great ideas about restaurants. And he's like, oh, well, I guess I don't know. What do you do yet? I have to own a restaurant one day. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. You can own a restaurant one day. If that's what you really want. Let's just say restaurants are the wheel. In this case, what are all the spokes? So owning a restaurant is one spoke. Of course, being a general manager of a restaurant is a spoke. But maybe doing a podcast where you, where you interview restaurant owners, this is a spoke. Or maybe you set up a newsletter of all the latest technologies in the restaurant business that restaurant owners need to be aware of, that's a spoke. Or maybe you set up coaching to restaurant owners. Like, hey, 2021 is going to be a different year for everybody. Here's what you need to know to make sure you have the maximum output from your maximum revenues and profits from your restaurant. So we figured out about a dozen or more different spokes of the wheel. And then I suggested. And he's like, well, how can I do all of these? I can only focus on one at a time. And I'm like, no, no. And then I explained experimenting to him. So now he's experimenting with about four of these different ideas manually. Like, for instance, there's ideas like, what if you can combine the ordering system with the reservation system. So let's say, Heather, you go to a restaurant regularly and they notice the next time you reserve, oh, last five times she was here, she ordered a dessert wine. Let's give her the same waiter and have him upsell her a slightly more expensive dessert wine. Like, oh, ma', am, we've got this special here today of dessert wines. And they already know you like dessert wines, so you're likely to purchase the special. And there's research on this, people who like to purchase the specials. But this was an example of how to experiment rather than automate right away. Rather than writing software to put the order system and the reservation system together, you can manually do it by keeping track of the orders for a few weeks and keeping track of the reservations for few weeks. And then, oh, you see someone come in, let's see if I can have them order a higher ticket amount than last time.

So how important is it when you go through this exercise? Because I did this exercise for. For my business, for myself, on my own. How important is it to elicit a conversation to do it with someone else the way you did it with your friend?

It's not important at all. Like, normally I would never do it in a conversation because I always like to just work on my ideas and then other ideas could sort of pollute the. Well, since you're passionate about something and you have the skills, they might not have the skills or they Might not be as skillful with ideas, but in this case, this was someone I was sort of helping out, and I'm doing a little experiment. You could say we skip the line, which is I picked a bunch of random people, and my goal is to make them all millionaires within a year if they listen to my advice very specifically. And this is one of the people who I'm working with. And it's working out very well so far. I've just started this all, but I've already had three or four meetings with four different people that I've been working with.

Do you know Jay Samet?

The name sounds familiar. Did he write for thestreet.com at one point?

I'm not sure, but he. His new book, I just interviewed him a couple weeks ago. He is so similar to what you're doing right now. It's unbelievable. The same kind of a test concept with trying to get people to follow a model that was successful for him and track their revenue. Very, very similar. That's so exciting to hear.

Oh, yeah, I see who he is. He's. Wow. He's pretty big in the accounting industry, actually. He made the video disc, the first interactive video disc. Arcade game. I think I remember that game. Gosh, I forget what it was called. It was.

All right, so before we end, I want to wrap up with one concept and story that I really like. The story of borrowing hours. And the story that you shared around Pele in the book was really powerful.

Yeah. So Pele is known as. And he probably is the best soccer player of all time. We call it soccer here and in Brazil. When he was growing up, he grew up very poor, and, you know, he lived in these buildings. It was all cement where he lived. There wasn't really a place to play soccer. So he and his friends played something called not football, but it's. I don't know how it's pronounced, but it's pronounced a little like football. I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's spelled fut bol. And what it is is in very close quarters in bare feet, and the ball is much smaller and tougher. So he got really good at maneuvering in very. You know, everybody's, like, crunched in on the field very close to each other, and he got very good at maneuvering around people and with his feet, maneuvering the ball and doing all sorts of, you know, things with the ball so that he can manipulate it in different ways. And that skill. Let's say he put 5,000 hours into that growing up. Well, he was able to borrow those 5,000 hours when he started playing soccer. It was like a luxury for him. It was the bigger field. His skills at manipulating the ball and passing and shooting were much enhanced in this luxuriously large field compared to football. So that's how he borrowed hours from the earlier game that he used later to become the best player of all time. In soccer, if you are good at starting businesses, you bring those skills from one business into the next. Like, okay, here's what we do. We don't file the trademark first. We do this, this, this first. Or with public speaking. I thought getting good at public speaking would help me with standup comedy. I would borrow the hours from public speaking and it did a little bit. But when I borrow hours from stand up comedy now to do public speaking, it's like a game changer. It's unbelievable. The more I go on stage to do comedy, the better public speaker I become.

I'm sure and certain that is the case. And that makes you unique and different. It's almost like a contrarian kind of way of looking at things. Something that, for example, with Pele, oh, he doesn't actually have soccer experience. This is a reason why he's not going to be good. But the fact that he did something differently and could apply it and borrow the hours, like you said, is what made him the best. Unique and so different.

Yeah, he was very different. Very unique. No one, really. I mean, maybe people are better now, but I don't know. He's always considered the best of all time.

James, everyone's got to get the book, skip the line. Not only is it such a phenomenal story that keeps you really engaged, but the tactics, the strategies that you share that I'm now applying to my business, they're priceless for people. And right now, who doesn't want to find ways to go ahead and skip the line? How can everyone find the book and.

Get the book skip the line on Amazon.com?

Well, that made it pretty easy. And how does everybody find you and.

Your podcast, the James Altucher show, everywhere you get podcasts and I also have a TV series on Amazon called Choose Yourself.

James, thank you so much for making time. I'm so.

Thank you, Heather. I really appreciate this.

I love the book and am so grateful that you put it out into the world. Until next time, my friend. More success to you.

Thank you so much, Heather. I really appreciate this. I'm gonna make it my own.

I decided to change that dynam. I couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

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