922 In Order to Be Successful You Must Do This: James Altucher

This is episode number 922 with serial entrepreneur and best selling author James Altucher.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.

Thanks for spending some time with me today.

Now let the class begin.

Foreign.

To share with you before we get started.

Nelson Mandela said, do not judge me by my successes. Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again. Thomas Edison I have not failed.

I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Bill Gates it's fine to celebrate success, but but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure and Michael Jordan. I failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed. If you are afraid of failing, if you're afraid of success, this episode is for you. I've always been taught that failure is the way you must fail in order to succeed. And that's why I've never been afraid of failure. I've been afraid of judgment. That's been my big thing I need to overcome is the fear of insecurity and doubt around other people judging me. But the fear of failure should never be something you're afraid of because that is the only way to grow and gain what you want. We've got a great interview today with James Altucher where he shares a story he's never shared before and it had me on the edge of my seat wanting him to continue to share more and more. Really captivating story that is going to inspire you and is really powerful. It's going to remind a lot of you about some things that were very challenging for you as well at one point. If you don't know who he is. Super successful guy, American hedge fund manager, entrepreneur, author, venture capitalist and podcaster. He's founded or co founded more than 20 companies, 17 of which have failed. That's right. He's batting, what is that, like 7% or something? Right. He has published 20 books and he is contributing to publications such as the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, and he's the host of the widely popular podcast the James Altucher Show. He does some great episodes over there as well. Check them out. I've got an episode out there right now with him where I share a lot of new stuff also. And in this interview we talk about.

How he was able to build companies.

From such a young age. He was really talented at a young age when he what it's like to be a jack of all trades and how that has supported his career, how he was able to lose all of his money completely broke and build his businesses back more than once, literally going home from $15 million to less than $200 in his bank account. Yes, it's crazy stories, an incredibly heartbreaking story again, that he's never shared before and what it was like not only in New York city, but during 9 11, but on the streets as the first plane hit the World Trade Center. He talks about this story, how he watched it happen from the building next door. Crazy. And what he's most proud of and what he regrets he did as a father. That and so much more. This is going to be a big one. Make sure to share with your friends Lewishouse.com 922 and check out the Show Notes for all the info. And now let's get into this episode with James Altucher.

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Anyways, we are here.

Welcome back to the School GR podcast. We've got my man James Altucher in the house.

Thanks for having me on. I'm going to take over the podcast for a second. We met early 2013. We were at that one talk that Mastermind talks. Remember, it was a competition, so whoever provided the most value to the won.

25 grand or something.

Yeah. Seems like huge amount for just winning a contest. And the audience would vote. And you gave a really. It was you, me, Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss, AJ Jacobs, a couple other people in our universe. And you gave this really inspiring talk about your football career, your injuries, your sister's couch. You're late building your first. Getting your first dollars from your first business and kind of the. The happiness that gave you and the validation they gave you and how you built up from there. It was a really good talk. And I went up there and just said, entrepreneurship sucks and blah, blah, blah. So I lost. Clearly.

Neither of us won, though.

Neither of us won. You know why? You know why? Joey Coleman won. So Joey col smart. He put everybody's picture from the audience on the wall. So of course, if you see your photo is like a natural cognitive bias. You vote for the person who put your photo, your kid's photo up there. So he was. He. And he used it as part of, like, connect with your customer. Like, yeah, that's.

And then told a story about a.

Few people in the audience. And he. It was smart because he spent like 10 hours of research and did the extra work and he deserved to win.

But that was seven years ago almost to the day. And we remember that. That was like a very interesting conference, the way they structured that contest. And I still. I could feel I could pick up the phone any day and talk, call any of those speakers. Like, it's. Somehow there was like a bonding thing that happened at that one conference.

Yes, that's right. And you've been on the show. I think that's your fourth time, I think.

And you've been on mine. Probably just the same amount.

Yeah, exactly. And here's a question.

You probably.

I think you started your podcast shortly after mine. I started seven years ago. Literally like a month ago.

Yeah. So I started mine. I started filming the episodes in, like, December 2013, and then I launched in January 2014.

2013. Got you. Okay. Yes. So I was. Yeah, January.

So I was a little after you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My first guest was, I think, either Tim Ferriss or Tucker Max or one of those people.

Now, here's a question I ask everyone before they jump on. So pre interview.

But I did shave before. Yes, thank you for asking.

No, but the question I had the question I ask before, but I wanted to ask you during so people actually know the questions I asked beforehand. Since we're podcasters and you've come on before, the question I always ask is, is there anything off limits? And I already asked you that. You told me what kind of was and what wasn't.

Yeah. I'll describe my answer, which is that I never mind hurting myself. I just don't say things about others that could potentially hurt them. So I'm always fine saying how stupid and idiotic I am on any one area.

Yes. And that's the second thing that I always ask, which I didn't ask you yet, but I'm going to ask now, is since you've done so much content, so many interviews, what would make this the most powerful interview you've ever done?

Wow, that's interesting. Actually, no one's ever asked me that.

Because if we're going to take people to spend their time listening to this, asking them to spend however long we're going to do this for, ask them to share it. If we're asking people to do this for me, I feel like it's a duty. It's a responsibility and obligation to get the most out of this moment. So that's why I always ask that question. Cause I'm like, we gotta really get in there.

I think if we both end up getting value out of this interview, then that's a real powerful interview. Because if you're asking me questions where you wanna learn the answers for yourself and. And then I'm asking back and we're both learning, then that's. If we're elevating each other, chances are it's gonna be good for the audience. And that's usually, like a good goal for me.

That's it.

So if I'm able to help you because of the questions you're asking, and you're able to help me because of our back and forth and stuff and the way you're asking the questions and so on, then I think it's a great podcast.

I've got a good first question then.

Sure.

So you've had. I think you're one of the most brilliant writers.

I don't know about them, but thank you.

Of our time in terms of captivating attention and constantly hooking with your storytelling.

Oh, thank you. That's high praise.

Yes.

And especially on Facebook. And we were talking before how I hope you do solo episodes like you rant on Facebook and telling these stories. Cause they're amazing.

I'm sorry to interrupt.

Yes.

But I've been. So we. Just. As we discussed before, I've been thinking about that somewhat, like, what if instead of every episode being an interview? And I always admire all the people I interview, and they're always great. But sometimes I do want to just tell stories. And I think, you know, a lot of people who have listened to my podcast, they haven't necessarily read the 3000 plus art, nor should they read the 3000 plus articles on my site or whatever. And I do see, in podcast world, storytelling is kind of moving up. I don't know if you've seen, like, even, like, true crime stories are moving up all sorts of storytelling. And so I just think you'd be.

Great at it, man.

I think it'd be fun, but I'm not sure yet.

Plus, you're a comedian, and you have a comedy store that you bought in New York City, so you've been practicing. I feel like you would just be able to make it amazing. So that's my goal for you, is that after this, you start doing solo episodes.

All right, I'm gonna do it.

Do one.

Yeah, do one.

Start next week and just do one of the stories that you posted on Facebook and just read it out loud. Yeah, and add them. So, anyways, here's my first question. You have gone through so many different life challenges. I feel like every time you write a story, I've known you, I mean, in seven years, but even just before that, you have so many crazy stories that you write about on Facebook. I'm curious, when was the last time you cried? Because you go through a lot of these pain and adversity, but I don't think people ever know if you actually show emotion or cry.

I think about two weeks ago, I was thinking of my daughter. So I have two daughters. My lovely wife, Robin, has three. Two daughters and one son. So together we have four daughters, one son. And I was thinking of my two daughters. They don't normally live with me, and it's been a long time since they've lived with me. And so sometimes I miss them and I wonder when they're going through a hard time. Sometimes I wonder if it's because I haven't been a more steady presence for them. And that made me sad missing them in that sense. And, you know, they're both going through their individual hard things because one's 17, one's 20, and, you know, sometimes it's hard when there's distance. And, like, I see them as much as I can. They don't live that far away. But they have school, they have responsibilities, they have other things. And so I was missing them, and I felt sad about that, and that encouraged me to cry. Yeah.

Do you cry often?

Or is it like, maybe like every few weeks? Really?

Yeah.

Wow. So everything could be.

That's great, man.

Yeah. I don't know if it's great or not.

Like, I think expressing emotion, whether it's privately or publicly, it doesn't matter. But expressing, allowing ourselves to feel is a powerful thing, as opposed to numb.

Yeah. I mean, personally, I agree, because I'm generally an optimist. Like, if you ask me, how's the world gonna be a year from now? I'll usually think it's gonna die. Better. I'll usually think it's gonna be better a year from now than a year ago.

You know, with the election coming, I'm.

Actually most worried about coronavirus, but that's another topic. But we could talk about any of these things. But because I okay the election, I don't even. How much does the President of the United States or any politics. 0. 0.

It affects me if I allow the negativity to take over mine. Otherwise, it doesn't affect me if I have to spend a little more in taxes or whatever. Like, unless something drastic changes, I don't.

Know what would change.

There's no really power they have to change.

No. But unless it's a war, then it.

Would change my life.

Okay. So, like, January 3rd, my kids came up to me, and instead of the usual bantering they do and annoying, whatever they say to me, they were like, dad, are we gonna get drafted? Cause that was when, you know, that guy Iranian was, you know, Suleimani was just killed. Or is it. Is there gonna be a draft? Are we gonna. Is there gonna be World War iii? And so it kind of inspired me to call up a military expert and do a podcast. What's actually happening. Because one thing I noticed with social media and that kind of. The kids get swept up in that, is that basically everyone's a spectator arguing with each other about meaninglessness. Like, there's so. It's so wasted energy. Yeah. So wasted. And I try to explain to kids, they're just. You have to know the difference between a spectator and an expert. And the experts are not arguing with tweets. Except for the President. But you might not be an expert. But so. So. So I wanted to calm my kids down, but in a sense, calm everyone down and actually find out what's going on. Yeah. And so. So. So I do feel when there's I do get sad when there's, like, painful things happening or when my kids are worried or when I see a horrible situation. But in general, I'm an optimist. Although for myself, I kind of, you know, I think about lots of things. I'm very, very emotional person.

Now you have two kids, right?

Two of mine, but then five altogether.

Yes.

Yes.

And your two biological daughters are 17 and 20.

So right now. Right now we have literally, their ages are 17, 18, 19, 20, 21.

Oh, my gosh. That's crazy.

Yeah. And four girls, one boy.

Wow.

So, so many. I feel like my period now is starting to synchronize with their periods.

They're crying and eating ice cream the.

Same day as you. I wake up in the middle of the night. I'm watching Friends and crying when Ross and Rachel break up. Oh, man. It's painful.

Okay, I'm curious about this now. As a father of two daughters, what's something that you're really proud of yourself? That you did really well as a father over the last 20 years? And what's something that you really regret? That if you could go back and relearn, do something differently that you would do differently with your daughters as a father?

Yeah, the regret is easier to say. Which. And by the way, a lot of people say, oh, I have no regrets. Also, I wouldn't be here where I am today. That's always BS When I hear that. Of course, everybody has regrets. So I wish I had just hugged them a little bit tighter. I remember getting off. You know, for a while I lived upstate in New York. I remember getting off the train. My oldest one was a little kid then. And she was just running and she jumps right into my arms. And I just wish I had held her like, a microsecond longer.

And.

And those moments like that. In terms of what I've done. Well, it's hard to say because they're very good kids in general and I love them. But what I've done really well recently is my oldest daughter dropped out of college. And I'm very proud of her.

She chose herself.

She chose herself. And I kept telling her, you know, everybody.

She skipped the line.

She skipped the line completely because that's just it. She's majoring in, like, acting and theater or she was majoring in acting and theater. And I. And I would say to her, you know, you're in your school in the middle of wherever and there's, you know, two teachers and a little acting program, but you. Or you could be in New York. City, auditioning for things and getting a huge head start on everybody.

And she's like getting real life experience.

Real life experience.

Trying little mini things.

Yeah, networking, by the way, she could still take classes. There's plenty of acting studios in New York City and there's things to audition for. And then there's the lifestyle. And you make, you network, you make connections. And, and if she wanted to learn things, you know, there are other things. There's online courses where you'll learn just as many skills. And she's like, but don't you need a degree to get a job? And I said, I don't even know if anybody working for me has a degree like I have. Nobody asks anymore. And now maybe they ask sometimes for the very first job. But skills, in this century, skills are more important than degrees. You need skills. You don't need some institution validating you like a parking validation. Here's your degree. And you paid. Every school, by the way, has the same tuition now. Yes, there are community colleges that are cheaper, but all the other schools tuition has gone up 10 times faster than inflation over the past 40 years, every single year. And so it's just, it's putting an entire generation into poverty because they're all in debt. It's 30 million kids in debt. It's horrible. Yeah.

And I care more about. I don't even know if I would ever look at a resume with the degree in mind. I would look at the results they've created and the, the energy they bring to the table.

Absolutely. What ideas are they? Are they able to go back and forth and like, maybe you should try this, maybe you should try that. Like that's the only thing really. Exactly.

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Is there a moment in your life again? There's so many crazy moments I feel like you've written all these books about this and all these posts on Facebook and tons of podcasts, but is there a moment in your life that drastically changed the course of everything from the direction you were going? I feel like this probably happens every year for you. Something always change. But is there one thing that you're like, okay, if this one thing didn't happen when I was 20 or 30 or whatever, that I would be nowhere close to where I'm at without this one thing?

I mean, there's a. There's a lot of losing the company.

You know, whatever it be.

Yeah, I think, I think a lot of people could probably say a lot of things. You know, I could say getting married, I could say having kids, but. And this almost sounds like a cliche, I almost hate to say it because it was much more important for so many. This one event was much more important for many people other than me, but I was in the World Trade center on 911 and I. There was a.

You were in it.

Yeah. So not up high. There was a Dean and DeLuca where I have had breakfast every morning. I lived three blocks away, so I had breakfast at the Dean and DeLuca.

Like 8am because it wasn't like 8.

Yeah, yeah. I was a day trader. So I would go out around 7:30 with my. My partner, my investing partner and we would go to Dean and DeLuca, kind of figure out our strategy for the day, have breakfast and then walk to my apartment where I had my day trading stuff set up. And we're walking back and we were walking down Church street, which is the main street that goes into the World Trade center at that time. And my business partner, he turns to me and says, hey, is the President coming into town or something? Because that looks like Air Force One maybe because it was like really unusually low. And then of course you saw the plane. So a split second later, we see the plane coming in. It's 600ft directly above us, like right above us. And there's other people on the street all kind of like wondering, is that. What is that? And then it goes so fast over your head and everybody just ducked. It's like an instinct. Everybody went to the ground like, you couldn't even not do that. And then we're all like. It only happened within a second. We're all watching. It goes right into the building. So regardless of 9 11, which was this political momentous event, we all watched with our own eyes, an airplane crash and people die instantly. So just the act of watching an airplane crash is Something you never expect. Like, everybody watched it on. You didn't even watch on TV later because it's not like that moment was filmed. But just seeing a plane crash is something that has never happened to me before and I hope never happens to me again. And then everything. And then I lived right there. So, you know, then just all the events of that day, you know, and again, everybody who lived there, who was obviously people in the building and the families of people in the building had it much worse. But, like, for instance, my business partner and I, we ran straight to the fire department on my street, and we said, hey, can we help? And they were really? Yeah. And they said, okay. They threw us two suits. Can you put these suits on?

Shut up.

Gave you suits?

Yeah. And I said, I just want to make sure, you know, we're not. I don't know how to put this suit on. Like, we're not firing. We just want to help with whatever you need help with.

So is this like five minutes within a crash or hours or.

No, it's right away.

So.

Because clearly it's crash.

You're seeing stuff. There's chaos, people running around, and you're like, so.

So the. My initial reaction was, this is weird. What happens to the brain? Like, my business partner, he was right away saying, we're being invaded. And I said, no, no, no. This is me, like, being crazy. This is me being like a kind of a crazy optimist. I said, no, no, no, it's too early for anyone to be in the building. It was 8:45am so clearly people were in the building. But, like, my brain was saying, no, there's nobody. And I said, that was probably some remote control accident. That's exactly what I said. And then. So we actually stood there a little bit while longer. And then you couldn't see the second plane because it came from the other side. But suddenly we see this other huge explosion. And everybody's like, we're being invaded. And we're just. We're right next to the building. And that's why we couldn't see the other plane come through. But we saw the massive explosions from the second plane hitting. And I said, no, no, no. My partner said, it was the second plane. And I said, no, no, no. It was just a kind of explosion from the first plane still happening. So I'm still being weird, like, in the building. And he's like, no, we're being invaded. And that's when we went to the fire department because clearly there was a fire. So he said, can we Help. And everyone's running around and they throw us the two suits. And. And I said. And they actually said, are you firemen? And they threw us the two suits. And I said, no, no, we're not, but we'll help in any other. We'll help in any way we can. We'll wear the suits if you want. And they said, no, no, no, only firemen. And so 100% of those people died. And because they went all. They were the first ones. The first responders. Yeah, they were the first responders into the building because they were running.

Right.

They ran into the building.

Yeah.

Before it collapsed.

Right. That was like. Right then. And they ran all the way up and we went back to my door.

You didn't follow?

You didn't suit on? No, no. They wouldn't let us because they said, if you're not fireman, you're not going into the building.

Wow.

And I. And we were like, well, where can we give blood? Or whatever? And they're like, I don't know. And we gotta go.

Too much chaos. There's just like, we gotta. Yeah.

And so, you know, and then I was on the roof of my building, and you saw it, like, the. Like the buildings collapsed and the black cloud just went over the building and.

Because you're a few blocks from it.

Yeah, we were just a few blocks.

So there's debris everywhere.

Oh, yeah, debris, asbestos, everything. And I remember my daughter, who was, I guess, three, she had been. Doesn't normally do this. She even sensed something bad was happening, like she peed on the floor. And she was three? Yeah, she was three. But she had stopped doing that. But she did it.

And.

And I was still not convinced it was an attack. And then the Pentagon. We saw on the tv, the Pentagon got hit, and then the TV shut off. And then I'm like, okay, this is probably an attack.

And so that's what, an hour, two hours later, Is that.

Yeah, that was all within the first hour. And. And then they evacuated the whole area. I don't mean to go on about 9, 11, but they evacuated the whole area. And we. And there were bullhorns like, you must evacuate. But my wife at that time was pregnant, and we had heard that there was asbestos in the black cloud. So I was saying, we're not going to evacuate. So there's a whole bunch of people in our apartment. I didn't. None of us wanted to go. And so we all stayed up all night taking turns listening to Rudy Giuliani was saying what buildings were shaking because we didn't know if there were any other buildings coming down. There was potential for another World Trade center building could have fallen on our house. So we were just keeping track. But I didn't want to take the risk of a pregnant woman with asbestos just six months pregnant. And the next morning, I get up and I go outside, and it was the most beautiful day. Like, it was sunny, not a cloud in the sky. There were ashes everywhere, literally. Cars were overturned and there were just guys in, you know, hazmat suits walking around and tanks, and that was the neighborhood. And then I went down to the corner and you look, and there was no World Trade Center. I'd grown up with that. And there was nothing there. And again, this is nothing. I'm not, like, telling history here, just my story. And then we decided, okay, it's clear enough, we'll leave. And there's three checkpoints along the way out, because no one was supposed to be in that area. We were so close. And so at each point, they're like, shining these huge flashlights. What are you guys doing here? And, like, what's. Who's in your car? IDs. And. And then at the Canal street, everyone's, like, hearing in, like, why is this car driving out of the area? Who are. And the police are yelling. The guys in tanks, the military guys were yelling.

Guns.

Yeah, who are you? Why were you here? And then, you know, that was just so that. And then the other guy, she finally evacuated.

And you went somewhere else.

Went somewhere else. But then I came back a few days later because I was just an idiot. And I figured, okay, I need to be here when the stock market opens. But my mind was not correct. Yeah, your mind gets scrambled. And so I decided, you know what, the market's going to go down a little bit, and then I'm going to buy as much. I'm going to borrow and buy as much of the stock.

It was smart thinking.

I guess it was sort of smart thinking, but I was really. I did not know anything about investing at the time. Of course, this is 20 years ago. I had no clue what I was doing. And so I put all my money in the stock market at the open. And the market went down huge. And then the market went down huge the next day. And I then borrowed, like, triple the amount and put it all in, and it went down huge again. Huge again. And finally I'm like, about. I had just made. I had made millions selling a company a few years earlier, and now I was like, just about at zero because I borrowed and the market had fallen 10, 15%. I borrowed like 500% at this point. And then I remember it was. I think it was the Friday morning. It opened up on a Tuesday, the following Tuesday, and then it was the Friday morning or following Monday. By Friday morning, I was so broke, it was like 10, 20. I said, I can't take it anymore. Just sell everything. I need like a few thousand dollars left because I'm going to die. And then four minutes later, the market went straight up for the next eight years.

Seven years, straight up.

No. I would have made so much money if I just held on to the end of that day, which is a classic kind of story. But I went broke. And I remember I immediately had to put my apartment up for sale. Couldn't really sell it because it was an FBI quarantined area for the next seven months and couldn't sell it. And I just went. That was the first time I went absolutely dead broke. Was starting from those events. And of course, again, I just want to qualify. Many people had a. Far worse families. People. I mean, we were right there. We saw the people jumping off.

You saw people jumping off the road?

Yeah, yeah, because they were. You had to back off because they were landing.

Oh, my gosh, man. And what does that do for you when you watch someone jump and kill? Essentially suicide. Forced to commit suicide. I think because of the fires.

Yeah. I mean, by then my mind was already scrambled. Like this. The plane. It was weird because I never saw an image of this. The plane went into the building, and what was weird was it's like you saw this little edge of the plane on fire, but still singing out. And the building itself looked jagged, like it's still up there. But it looked like it was. It looked like a bad scissor had tried to cut through the building. And so it was, like, off somehow and blurry because of all that heat. And. And so that was the image that really. It took about six years before I stopped at least once every week or so, you know, dreaming about that. Not pleasant dreams, but, like, really horrible dreams. And that was really affecting me much, much more. And then. And then just then just all the calamity for months and years. That happened years ago to me. Years years ago afterwards. It happened to everybody. It happened to that whole area. But ultimately had to start from scratch with everything because, again, I always have to say, I don't really tell the story because everybody else had it much worse than me. So I don't like to say.

But you got to witness and experience it. From the ground level. From your own experience.

Yeah. And again, it was. It was. Now, in retrospect, I see how my brain was. So just. I should not have been functioning for a good long while afterwards. And I tried to. And then. That's really the first time I went broke. I lost my home. I mean, I was sometimes so upset. Like, the police had to be called and I had to be, like, medicated. And I mean, it was really. Yeah, it was really an upsetting.

Your wife at the time would call the police.

Yeah.

And so, like, crazy manic.

Not quite manic, just like, I was suicidal. Like, really. I. I didn't know what I was going to do. Because you had no money and you.

Had these kids and you had to take care of everything.

I had two kids. I had no money. I was living in, you know, I just had a lot of money. So I was living. And I was an idiot. Whenever you make a lot of money, you should. This is what I tell people now is you should let the money kind of marinate your soul a little bit. Like, get used to it. Instead, the first thing I did was I bought, like, the biggest apartment I could find and ramp up my expenses beyond any level. Imag. Imaginable. And so I had all these expenses and I had no. And by the way, also, there was this Internet recession happening. Like, the Internet bubble had burst. I was an Internet guy, so nobody was returning my calls. I had no opportunities. I had no skills at that point, Nothing going for me, no money. I couldn't sell my place. I was losing it. And every day I was watching myself lose it. I didn't know what my kids were going to do, so I thought I'd failed them. I had this life insurance policy for them, but I was kind of. I really. I say I was suicidal, but ultimately I really didn't want to kill myself. I didn't want to do it. And it's actually really hard to kill yourself without hurting yourself. I didn't want to do that, and I just didn't know what I was going to do.

You're just kind of, like, manic, stressed, like. Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

So that was. There was definitely a before and after in that, because that changed my life in a bad way for a long time, but I needed it because that's when I learned a lot of things about myself and recovering and bouncing back from that. And I wouldn't. I don't want to say I don't regret what happened then, because I do. But I also know that there was. I Learned a lot about myself coming back from that. And I learned about bouncing back. And I learned not quite, not quite anti fragility yet, but at least resilience. Later on I think I learned how to turn negative events into something positive. But back then I was just miserable and barely treading water until I started to get a glimpse of the sun and how I could maybe come back. But that took a long time.

Would you say that was the most fearful moment of your life or was there another time?

No, that was definitely the most fearful. Yeah. Yeah, because a plane crashed right over my head. And then also I thought the world was over. Like you get that feeling. Once my optimism washed away, I instantly thought that was it, the world's over, like it's ending. Because you're right, my brain was so messed up. And so that was. I was definitely afraid. And then a week later or a week and a half later, I was afraid because I was going broke. And then I was miserable because then if I had waited like three and a half minutes, I would have made all the money back.

See the money going up a little bit.

Yeah, it was like such a cliche that it happened that way too, but it happened.

Would you change it if you could go back and change these?

Absolutely, 100%. Although I would change it for the sake of myself then, but for the sake of myself now, I don't think it would be a good thing because I really did sort of come out of literally those ashes a much better person in so many ways. And I learned so much not from that, those events, but learned about myself from the events that happened afterwards of coming back and like how to come back from, you know, disaster. And again, it was like. It was disaster in the sense I was. I hadn't. I had no family at the time other than my family that I was taking care of. So I had. And I had zero, zero cash, zero possibilities, no one to take care, you know, no one. I couldn't call anybody and say, hey, wire over some money or lend me some money. I had nothing. And I had to. And I was ashamed because I had. People knew me in one context. Oh, I used to sold this company, made this money, and now I just had nothing. So I was more ashamed than I'd ever been before. And so I had to figure out how do I. I didn't even think it was possible to bounce back. I thought I was just going to fake it until I was just praying to die every day. So that was definitely the moment I was most afraid throughout the Next few years. I never stopped being afraid from that moment until many years later.

Do you, do you feel afraid now?

Sometimes. What?

About what?

Well, I always tell my wife now I almost have a PTSD about. Not about that, about looking at my bank account. Because I remember there was one time shortly after this, a few months after this, I hadn't looked at my bank account. I was too afraid. So one time it says, do you want to check your balance when you're in the atm? And I said, sure. Now it's going to sound crazy, but two years earlier it had said over 15 million. Oh my God, the exact same account. Now it said $143. Holy. And that was it. That's all I had.

And that messes with your brain.

Yeah. And look, I was very privileged and blessed to have built up a company, but I thought I had won the lottery. I wasn't really a natural businessman. I didn't think I was. And I wasn't really interested in business. And so I think that's it. And I can't get a job. I don't know what to do. And nobody was hiring. It was a recession anyway. So I just. So I had this fear of always looking at my bank account after that. And so just a couple years ago or recently, I would go years without looking at the balance or looking at my bank activity, which is what normal people should do. And one time I looked at my bank account and saw, oh, I really need to start looking at my bank account more because I saw someone had been stealing from me on a monthly basis and I didn't know. And so, and I'm good with, you know, I now realize where my skills are in terms of making money and bouncing back and so on. But this one childlike behavior of not looking at my bank account, that was a wake up lesson.

How often do you look at your bank account now?

Now I look at it every couple days.

Every couple days?

Yeah.

What does it do for you when you look at it?

I mean, now I'm more neutral about it now. It doesn't really.

It doesn't affect you either way.

I mean, it'll affect me a little bit like if I'm nervous, but it doesn't really affect me the same way.

Do you feel like you used to attach a lot of your self worth to how much money you had in the account?

100%. Yeah, that was my self worth. My net worth was my self worth.

What do you attach your self worth to now?

Well, now, I mean, I have a whole and this is when I as I bounced back, you know, and it took years, then this didn't happen just once. Losing all my money, having a good four times, but where I would just make a lot of money and then lose everything and think how can I do this again? And then make it again and lose it again and on and on. And so I started to build a skill set of things that were important to me so that it doesn't happen again. So I get to have a more balanced life. Because I think when you attach when your only metric of your self worth is something that's so non important for yourself with which is money, money is ultimately an ancillary effect of living a good healthy life. And if you say money is more important, that money is my life, then you're going to lose, at least for me, I'm going to lose my money. So I just train myself to say, okay, I'm gonna, my self worth is more a function. Or I don't even say that. I say at the end of the day, I say today what did I do to work on my physical health? Which doesn't mean be an athlete like Lewis Howes. It means did I eat well, move well, sleep well, eight hours. Emotional health, am I good with the relationships around me and my friends and am I removing toxic people from my life? Emotional health is very important because if you're arguing with a spouse or a girlfriend or even kids or whatever, or business partners, you're not going to be creative to do the things you're meant to do in life. And same thing with physical health. If you're sick in bed, you can't be creative. And then creative health every day. It's the most important exercise I do every day, which is I exercise what I call the idea muscle. So I take a pad and I write 10 ideas down every single day. And I've been doing that forever. Like not one day goes by I.

Don'T do that because new ideas are.

The same ideas, new ideas. So, and they don't have to be good ideas about what just it could be business ideas, it could be ideas for guests. For Lewis Howes, like I'm just exercising. It could be book ideas, it could be the other day, the other day I came up with 10 game ideas, ideas for games I can create. And then the next day I took one of those games and like, okay, I came up with ideas for how to make the game 10 ideas. You know what I call execution ideas which help you with, you know, people say ideas are dime a dozen Execution is everything. They don't realize execution ideas are. There's a range from bad to good, and you have to have good execution ideas. That's a muscle, too. So sometimes I'll exercise, I'll write down 10 execution ideas. So it's about nothing. And I'll never really use them. Sometimes I will. But if you have 3650 ideas a year, most of them are horrible. But you want to just keep. You want to just keep the wheels turning. It is a muscle, and it atrophies so super fast. And then the fourth leg is. I don't like. It's sort of like a spiritual health. But that just means do I acknowledge what is what I have no control over and just focus on the things I have control over? Most things we have no control over.

Yeah. So it seems like there's two groups of people, from my perspective, where people are obsessed about money. Making money. They talk about it, they put their attention towards it. They love it. And it seems like there's a group of people in the world that are afraid of money. They don't know how to make it. They're scared of it. It's bad and evil type of thing. Why do you think that is? There's kind of two groups. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe it's not those two groups.

No, I think you're right.

I feel like it's kind of people are obsessed about it, and they love it or they hate it, and they kind of reject it because they think that money's bad or whatever.

Yeah. I think for the first group, they mistakenly think money is the only way to get freedom. And so they obsess on. They want to be free, and so they obsess on how much money they can make. And the irony being, of course, they work 100 hours a week for 40 years, and then life's over. Yeah. So where did you spend your freedom? On nothing. So that's an extreme. Right. So that's the extreme of one type. And so they think the pursuit of money is everything. And I kind of was in that category, sort of. And then there's the other type, where I think they want to have an excuse in place just in case they don't make a lot of money. So they say, well, I didn't make a lot of money because you have to do something bad to make a lot of money. Which is really not true. Like, as you know, and I'm sure many of your guests express this as well, is that relationships are really important when you're Making money. And you can't have relationships if you're a bad guy, if you're a bad woman, you know, if you're, if you're a bad player in this game of life, no one's going to want to do deals with you. So Now I make 99.999% of my money off of relationships I've built up over the past 16, 17, 18 years, sometimes even 30 years, sometimes people from my childhood. If you have good relationships and you're a good person and they trust you, you do deals together, people, it's really hard to find somebody to work with. And if you could find people you know and trust and you can get in the trenches with, then that's a valuable resource. And so if you're a good person and a good player in this game, it's important.

I feel like you've been on probably both sides of the spectrum where you obsessed about money and you attached your net worth or your self worth to your net worth. And it was when you didn't have it, you were afraid and you're freaking out. And there's also times where you're like, screw it, I don't need anything. I'm gonna live with like five possessions or whatever you did. And it doesn't matter if there's lots of money or no money. Cause I'm fine with nothing. And I'm gonna be happy either way. Like you've kind of had both sides.

Yeah, I mean, I was always originally like that. Like I worked at hbo, the television company. I just wanted to write. I wanted, my dream was to write novels and make TV shows. And I was working on a TV show for HBO and I got this call. It was my sister and my brother in law. He was in the CD ROM business. And it's like, oh, you gotta, you gotta see this new thing, the web, the world wide web. It was just kind of starting up and I was kind of an expert. One of the. There was only maybe five people in New York City at the time who knew how to make a website. So I said to my brother in.

Law, what year is this?

19. 1994. Wow. And so I said to him, I'll show you how to make a website. I don't want to help your business, but I'll show you how to make a website. You should do this. You should start pitching this to your clients. But he didn't speak English so well.

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He he agreed with me. This web thing is interesting because it was like what they were doing for CD ROMs but connected to the whole world. And CD ROMs, of course, were going away. And so he's like, can you help me write the proposals? He didn't really speak or write English. He was French and they don't feel it's important to learn English, I don't know why. And so I would start writing these proposals for him and then he's like, I can't really go to the meetings because I can't sell, I don't speak English. And so I, I would go to the meetings. And then I realized something. Here I am, I was working on this weird TV show idea for hbo. I was writing a novel. I was living in a little one room place with just one single foam futon on the floor in Astoria, Queens, which is near Manhattan. And then I would leave HBO in the middle of the day, sneak into a suit and go across the street to American Express. And then I realized, oh, I'm good at selling something, anything, and I believe in this. I said to them, you're going to need, and every company is going to need this web thing to interact with all their customers eventually. And so they said, well, all right, let's do it. And so we started American Express. Yeah, American Express.

You built a website for them?

I built American Express.com I built.

No way.

I built sites you would not believe at this point. No, I built American Express.comoneson.com, time Warner.com site.

Built.

Yeah, yeah.

How did you build that? I mean you coded them or.

Yeah, I coded them. I was a, my original background is I'm a computer science and you know, technical guy and, and I did hundreds and hundreds of websites.

Did you have a team also or is it just like coding and designing yourself?

So I was a full time employee at hbo and in the middle of the day I'd break out and, and go to these meetings where I would sell the hell out of our stuff services.

And then you would build them yourself and then.

Well, then I would build them myself. Our first like, let's say dozen or so. And then we started hiring people. We were profitable from day one. And so I had about 20 or 30 employees by the time I quit my job at HBO. So, and then I was, I was, I was the CEO of the company and my brother in law, he was like the designer or whatever. And, and we had employees, we had programmers, we were buying, we were renting new big office space, like 10,000 square feet of office space. And at HBO my title was junior analyst programmer. And then at. By night. Yeah, by night I'm talking to like, I remember when we were doing miramax.com and you know the movie studio that Harvey Weinstein ran And it was like midnight. And the people on their side in the marketing department, they were like, you've got to get this finished by 1am Because Harvey Weinstein's coming in and he's, he will eat us alive. Like, he's like the worst. And so we would do that. And we did the, you know, in terms of movies, we did the Matrix. We did the Scream movies.

The websites for them.

Yeah, the websites for them.

That's pretty cool.

The Matrix website and America and American Express.com were both a quarter million dollars.

Oh my gosh.

But just the Matrix by itself.

So much.

Yeah, it was a lot.

So you guys were making money back then?

We were making money. I was. And my salary was 40,000 a year at HBO.

But they were all custom sites because there was no like WordPress plugins. There was nothing to build on.

This is why I was a stupid business person because I didn't really understand the difference between. I didn't really understand the nuances in business. People think, oh, I'm good at business. Or there's a skill at business. There's no such skill called business. There's a bunch of skills in a bag. There's negotiating, there's marketing, there's sales ideas. Yeah, sales leadership, execution. And then there's more nuanced skills like valuation, raising money. Selling a company. Selling a company is very difficult. So I didn't understand valuation. So I'll tell you a quick example. American Express.com was an enormous website. It's like 60,000 pages. So I wrote software to basically automatically generate all the pages. And I put a little bit bulletin board to the side of every page. So in every department of American Express they could comment and I would get emails from all the comments from every department. American Express, I essentially built like a WordPress. Yeah. And I was thinking to myself, I remember telling one person who was, who wanted to like intern and learn and I said, don't tell American Express that I'm doing this because I don't want them to know how few hours I'm working on this. And here I built software that was like much later, could have been maybe a multi billion dollar thing. And I was like, no, no, I just want to be profitable. And I didn't realize that, you know, sometimes you want to build something. I didn't understand the difference between scalability and profitability. I thought, oh, of course it's good to be profitable. I don't care about scalability. I just want to make money. And so did you end up selling that company yeah. We sold that company for the 15 million that I had in my bank account, went broke, and then I went immediate, and then I went a couple years later, like, dead broke.

Now, what do you think? After all these lessons from making money, being around billionaires, losing it, making it all this, like, 20 times, you did it over in your lifetime. What is the pathway towards becoming financially free without making money? Making. Become a prisoner of the money you're making. So how do you. We want freedom.

Yeah.

Typically, money will help us, give us resources to provide certain things. But how do we not let it control us? And how do we make a lot of it while not letting it control us?

I think it's a hard question to answer because all the time you're thinking, okay, what activities am I involved in that are making money? And so on. But I realized, and this took me a really long time to realize because I was so afraid after that 9, 11 moment. For the next 10 or 9 years, all I was focused on was, I better not go broke again. And so my mind was so focused on money. And then I finally was like, I can't do this anymore. I'm wearing myself out. I'm unhealthy. Nothing's going right. I'm in bad relationships. I'm in. I'm not being creative. And so finally I said, finally, I moved out of the city. I gave up. I moved out of the city. I moved upstate New York. And I just focused on things I love doing, like writing. And that was it writing at the time. I just loved writing and relaxing and being more creative. And then I also had made enough in little pieces here and there that I would always turn over. I would always invest the money in private companies, not public companies, but private companies that I trusted, where I trusted the CEO. I knew the CEO had done it before. I trusted his vision, and I put money with them. Because then it's like as if you started a company, but you outsource all the work to someone better than you.

You don't have to do the work.

And you don't have to do it. So, yes, the CEO will make a lot more than me, but that's fine. He's doing. He's traveling all over the world. And Traveling has 300 employees and managing them. And I get to just sit by the river and write a book or.

Whatever, get some advice. What, once a month?

Yeah. And so I ended up writing and focusing on that. And through my writing, I tell all these stories. And I think vulnerability, when you're writing a good Writer is going to be vulnerable. And you do this in your books and a good writer is going to be vulnerable. And vulnerability actually is what buys freedom. Because if you say, oh, I've been through this, this, this, this, how can people ever affect you? Like, you've been vulnerable about many things in your life. And someone says, yeah, Louis, you this. Yeah, okay, bring it on. I've already said that. Yeah.

Eight Mile on yourself.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's the last song, the winning song in 8 Mile.

Exactly.

And so I just was writing and building this trust and freedom and, you know, building a whole new subculture of connections and networks. And my books were best selling books. And look, ultimately that's how we met. That's how I met a lot of our mutual friends. And then what happened was very interesting, is that more and more opportunities because people saw, oh yeah, this guy is smart about business. Because believe it or not, I actually developed some skills in business over this time. I started a whole bunch of businesses and some of them worked, some of them didn't. But I was always very honest about my lessons that I learned. And I would write for all these businesses, blogs and the Financial Times and so on. And I was also honest about myself. So people would trust me and I would see more and more opportunities. And then I started networking. People like, you should meet this person. You should meet this person. And that would get me, you know, opportunities. And so gradually I built together this portfolio of private companies that I really believed in. And then some of them started to exit. And that was really the most of. And still ongoing. Like, this is what I do for. But I never have to think about it. So all day long, as you know, I'm a podcaster, I'm a writer, I'm working on TV shows, I'm working on all the things I dreamed of working on 20 years ago. And now I actually get to do it.

You're doing it. What is the best investment you've made in the last five years that's paid the biggest dividends?

Sure. Yeah. And this is actually an ongoing. So your best investments, you almost never exit because if a company is doing well, your worst investments, you know right away they go bankrupt immediately and they'll happen. But your best investments, you never really. It takes a really long time for them to exit. Because if a company is doubling every month or every year, where else are you going to get that return? You're not going to get it in the stock market. So most companies that are really good don't exit for a really Long time. So this is an ongoing one. But a few years ago, this was during a period where I threw out all of my belongings and. And I was just moving from Airbnb to Airbnb. I wasn't renting and I wasn't owning. And so one of my friends who I had helped, again, this is relationships. Ten years earlier, I'd invested in this guy's hedge fund. I helped them make a lot of money. And he's like, why don't you just stay with me? And he had this huge, enormous 10,000 square foot apartment, whatever, in New York City. And so we would just hang out and talk every night. And this was during the. There was this big movement, blacklivesmatter. You know, people were getting killed, both minorities and mentally ill people. There was a lot of. Definitely not. There was a lot of problems in law enforcement. And it wasn't on one side or the other. There's nobody to blame. The real blame is the fact that there was only guns and Tasers and these weren't non lethal weapons like people. We were getting videos from friends who were police officers. Here's another video of someone accidentally killed with a taser. It was usually a mentally ill person or it was really sad. And so we started thinking, well, what could be a solution? And we brainstormed and he had worked with another company. When I had invested in his fund, the guy had made a sonic gun. It could shoot at you and blow your eardrums out. So we called him. My friend actually called him. I'm not gonna take credit for that, but my friend called him. He couldn't do it, but he said, well, how about this? How about a gun that shoots steel? Velcro, I forgot the actual material, but it's a steel wrap that shoots at the speed of sound and wraps around the potential criminal. So this way if someone is mentally ill or anything and is within a 21 foot radius is the law. And they don't respond to a verbal command, now you have a choice.

You don't have to harm them.

Yeah, you don't have to harm them. You could just. It's like almost like mobile handcuffs. And so it shoots at the speed of sound, it wraps really tight around you, but it doesn't hurt you. I mean, I've been wrapped plenty of times. It's not. It doesn't hurt.

You've had been shot at with.

Yeah, yeah. Really? Yeah. The, the. No, no, zero. If you, if you like a rope.

Is it like a. Yeah, it's a.

Steel cable and It. But it's so fast. It's just instantly you're.

Yeah.

And if you try to struggle, it tightens up. So you can't struggle that much.

Venus flytrap type thing.

It's like. And so lots of law enforcement firms are now it's a relatively young company. This was just a few years ago. We had the idea and this inventor made it. And then I wasn't involved except after that, just as an investor. But I was an investor in the initial startup capital. So before even like the initial round and now hundreds. I don't know how many police departments, but everybody's testing it out. At the very least. We're doing this in LA la. People is testing it out. And all over the world, police departments from every single country are testing it out. We went public and so I'm not trying to push it or anything, so I won't say the symbol, but we went public. It's been doing very well and that's probably been one of my best investments. So that's done well. But I have a lot of. I have like, I'm in like 20 different companies right now, but that's number one at the moment.

If there's a millennial in their 20s or early 30s who only has $1,000 to their name, what should they invest in to help them multiply their wealth in the future?

Well, absolutely invest in themselves at that point. You're not going to have the network yet to invest in other things. Don't invest in the stock market because why do you have an ad? You always have to ask yourself why nobody wakes up and says to themselves, I can't wait to make James Altucher rich today. Like there's not mysterious opportunities that you, a young 23 year old, are going to suddenly find that nobody else out of the 7 million people found. So opportunities like that don't exist. But where you do have an opportunity is you can take $1,000 and take, I don't know, a photography course and buy a camera and then you get a wedding gig from one of your friends who doesn't have a lot of money. You say, oh, I'll just charge you $2,000 now. You just got 100% return on your money and you could do it again and again and again. That's kind of what I did with websites initially. So I didn't have any money and I just had a skill. So skills. Giving yourself more skills is the key. That's the key to any success while at the same time being healthy. You can't get skills if you're not healthy in these various ways. Yeah, but you've got, if you invest in yourself, that's how you double, double, double for the first 20 doubles. And that's first 20 doubles of $1,000 is a million dollars. So do the first $20 of 20 doubles just on your skills. And skills are fun to learn. You might as well learn a lot of skills.

You just started learning comedy in the last three years. What's the skill you want to learn next?

Well, I'm still.

You're doing stand up comedy.

Yeah, Stand up comedy is a very hard skill. That's kind of been a fascinating thing to learn. And I'm doubling down on my podcast. I'm writing a lot. And look at yourself. You, you know, look at how many skills you've learned. You went from football to handball to. Okay, I'm going to build. I'm going to learn the basics of business building with LinkedIn. Okay, now podcasting so I can spread the message in this scalable way. And you build skills as you grow. That's, you know, it's not like, you know, that's really where you made the money from. You made the money. I just went to your movie premiere last night. An excellent movie, Chasing greatness. That's these skills exponentially grow. You couldn't have made that movie even six years ago. You learned a bunch of skills to make that movie. And so I just want to continue building my creativity in different directions. Very important for me is, and which I didn't know how to do earlier is how to do little experiments. So I always say, what's an experiment I can do that doesn't cost me much time, doesn't cost me any or little money, that will. And the upside of what I could learn and maybe benefit is enormous. So, for instance, going up the very first time, going up to do stand up comedy didn't take me. It only takes five minutes to do that. Didn't cost me any money to do that. And the upside in terms of, is this an interest of mine? Is this, can this help other skills? Can this have benefits? And it's just fun. That was a great little experiment.

Yeah.

And then I'm always doing like maybe a dozen or more experiments at any given time that are just fun for me. And I get to learn things, I get to try things. And if one thing succeeds, then it's enormous. This rap thing was a little experiment. Let's call this guy and see if he can come up with something and then we'll Put money with him. So just little experimenting is like very key.

I'm always, for me, skills is everything. And I think when you're in your 20s, you should learn as many skills as possible because it's like a tool belt that you can always whip out at any moment when you need something.

And it never stops. Like you always read about the 10,000 hour rule. You need to put 10,000 hours to really learn a skill. But it's not true if you're really good at constructing these micro experiments in the things that you love doing.

Challenges.

Yeah. Challenge yourself. So this is like four or five years ago when I was first learning, as an example, stand up comedy. I went onto a subway car and did stand up comedy there.

That sucks.

That sucks huge. Nobody wanted to hear me. Nobody. Everybody was like, what is this guy doing? It's not like they paid a cover charge and they were all coming to see a comedian. And then I would just start telling jokes. And that was a way to challenge myself. I knew in a way that would help me skip the line compared to people who didn't do that. So. And I was always doing mini experiments to push myself in a weird way that would cost me nothing.

That's great.

And so that works.

I've got two questions left for you. This question is, is there anything that. I feel like you may not have an answer for this because you expose yourself so much. Is there anything that you're really afraid of people knowing about you, who you truly are, that would make them not like you or love you anymore if they truly knew something about you that you were afraid of?

You know, the other day I was thinking this question, so if you had asked me three days ago, I could have answered this. But then I wrote it up because it was like, there you go. I always have a rule. I'm not going to publish something unless I'm afraid of what people will think of me. So I've been dealing.

So when you're afraid, then you publish it?

Yeah. I ask myself right before I write something, and I ask myself right before I hit publish, am I afraid? Is there something in here that I'm afraid what people will think of me before I hit public? You know, after I hit public.

Why do you do that? Why do you?

Because if I'm not afraid, then probably someone else has written this already. And so it's not unique. If I'm afraid and I've been so vulnerable and I've been, you know, and there's reasons in my life that I would be afraid of this that I could. It's probably something that's unique and has, I don't know, it's probably something that's going to be interesting both to me and maybe the reader. And it's a little more freeing for me. Again, the vulnerability buys freedom. And so in 2010, I was super stressed out again about money or 2009. I was again going broke and stressed and whatever and kids and blah, blah, losing a home. That's all the same thing. And to deal with my anxiety, the doctor recommended this pill called Klonopin, which is kind of like a long lasting Xanax. And it didn't work. So I took a large dose. Didn't work. Took a large dose, didn't work. Took a larger dose. So I was on this huge dose and it worked. It was like a miracle drug. I have to say I was not anxious at all after that. It was incredible. After three or four weeks, the reasons for my anxiety had died down.

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A month or so, the reasons for my anxiety had died down and I went to the doc and I tried to get off. I said, okay, I don't need this anymore. So I got off. One day passes, no problem. I'm like Superman. I'm not. I'm great. The second day, I couldn't sleep at all. And it was like. And then I was sitting in the middle of the night, just sitting up and it's like the whole world was like rushing past me. And then I found out this is like one of the most physically addictive drugs you could possibly take. And so I was taking this enormous dose that I had gotten after a couple months I had gotten used to and depended on. And I go to the doctor and he's like, yeah, yeah, nothing bad will happen, but you have to get off. If you get off Too quickly. You could have epileptic seizures. There's all these crazy. There's all these things that could happen. And he lists. And then I looked it up, and there's like 50 bad things that could happen. Heart attack, early Alzheimer's, strokes, dementia, blurriness, you know, seizures. And so he said, you got to get off a quarter milligram every three to six months. And so I'm like. It's like nine years later. I'm still in the final stages.

You're still weaning off of the weaning off.

Because there were times also where I got afraid bad things are happening in my life, you know, relationships or this or that. Bad things are happening. I better maybe not. Maybe I should slow down the weaning off. And it wasn't doing anything for me because my tolerance was through the roof. So it actually wasn't. After those first few months in 2010, it wasn't curing my anxiety or something. Yeah. It was not even. It wasn't even placebo. It was just purely physical dependence. Like, if I stopped taking it, I would go, anxiety. Yeah. Because I had nothing left. I had no chemicals left in me to manage.

Yeah.

I had no infrastructure. The pill had taken the infrastructure away to deal with anxiety. So I had to rebuild. That's what going into withdrawal. I had to rebuild that infrastructure. And it's been taking. I'm like in the final stages of this. And I wrote about it and I wondered and a. I said I was scared, actually of going completely off of it because it's been in my life for all these years. Even if it hasn't been working, who knows what it's been doing? Maybe it has been helping me. Yeah. And then I was. Before I hit publish, I asked myself the usual question. Am I afraid of what people will think of me? And of course I was, because I never call my books self help, but other people do. I always just write my own stories and my own experiences. But people who had kind of looked towards some of my advice. Would they question advice if they knew I had this addiction? And of course, business advice or any advice had nothing to do with the addiction when people could think it. And I was addicted. And so that was a scary thing. And that was three days ago. I wrote that.

Perfect.

I love it. Before I ask the final question, you've got a podcast. Where can we find your podcast?

The James Altucher Show. And I'm going to take your advice. I'm going to start telling stories.

That's it, man. I think your Podcast is going to grow in a big way when you start telling these stories yourself.

Personally. Well, it's something I want to. We could talk about. I'm curious. Like, the podcast landscape has changed so much since 2014, and you really have to stay up with it. And formats have changed and ideas have been tried, and I think I've really been in that interview format, you know, in the trenches there with you since the beginning. And we both interviewed the most amazing people in the world. But after a while, you wanna, what's next? Yeah, you have to think, what's next? And I think for me, it's the storytelling.

I think you'd be great at it, man, you gotta do it.

I hope so. You gotta do it.

And always when you guys, when you get the clips of your stories and do those little cartoons within your interviews, those always do amazing.

Yeah, so.

So just do the whole thing, you know?

Yeah, no, I'm gonna do that. And I've only just recently started doing video, so in that context, I think it's interesting.

That'll help you a lot. So get the podcast. James Alter show. I follow this guy on Facebook. You're like the funniest writer I know. Crazy, horrible stuff. Here's a question I've asked you. Your definition of greatness. I've asked you these other things before, so I have a new question for you. Imagine this is the last five minutes of your life and hypothetical question, and you get to leave a message behind to only your daughters. And you can only share three pieces of advice with your daughters, and this is all they would have of you to remember for the rest of their life as they go on and get married or be in relationships or have kids or not. But they go on to live their life, and you can only share three things with them that they would have to remember their dad by. What would you share with them?

I think, you know, I wouldn't tell them to do anything I wasn't already doing. So it's the same thing I said earlier. Stay physically healthy, emotionally healthy, no toxic relationships only, and keep improving your good relationships and be creative every day. And then you're gonna have a mostly happy life. The goal is not happiness, but you're have a mostly good, expansive life if you do that. So again, it's the same advice I had to tell myself and train myself to live by.

There you go.

James Altscher.

All right, sir. Appreciate you so much. It's been so long since we last podcast. It's been like two years.

Has it been?

Yeah. 2017, I think was our last podcast.

When I had my last book, because I came to the studio, right?

Well, and then I came to you. I came to your apartment, your old place, and then. Yeah, you came to my. We were always trading back and forth, so it was good to do it again.

My man. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and are reminded about the power of failure, about the power of learning through trying, through doing, through action, through making mistakes. And that's where you gain your skills. That's where you gain your knowledge. Not by just thinking about something or reading about something. It's about applying something, taking action and learning from mistakes. Hopefully, hopefully you don't repeat the same mistake over and over. Hopefully your failure, you learn from it quickly. That's the goal for all of us. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to share it with a friend. You can change a friend's life by texting them the link lewishouse.com 922 or by just sharing the link on the Apple podcast or Spotify podcast that you're.

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