How To Overcome Embarrassment & Reach Your Goals Faster w/James Altucher EP 1104

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If you've listened to the School of Greatness podcast for a while, you know how important acceptance is when it comes to personal growth. And you know who else is big on acceptance? Acceptance, Discover. You see, Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. That's a whole lot of places and a whole lot of acceptance, which is great for Discover, but even better for you. Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, learn more at discover.com/creditcard. This is episode number 1104 with 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. Bruce Lee said, if you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done. And Michael Jordan said, Sometimes things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night. My guest today is James Altucher, a good friend of mine who has run more than 20 companies and is currently an investor or an advisor in over 30 companies. But at one point, James lost everything in a matter of months, went from having $15 million to $143 in his bank. He pretty much lost it all overnight. And he realized today's standard view of success comes with a lot of conditions and the only effective way to be successful is to choose yourself. He's written a new book called skip the line, the 10, 000 experiments rule and other surprising advice for reaching your goals. And in this episode, we discuss why James hates the 10, 000 hour rule and what he believes you should do instead of that. How you can become the top 1% in the world of what you like and monetize your dream, how James was able to overcome embarrassment and practice standup comedy, how to develop a mindset. And if you're enjoying this in any moment, make sure to share this with a friend that you think would be inspired by this story and these lessons as well. Just use the link lewishouse.com/1104 or copy and paste this link wherever you're listening to this podcast. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only James Altucher. We deserve to know what we're putting in our bodies and why, especially when it comes to something we take every day. That's why I've been taking essential vitamins for men from Ritual, for the past couple of months, and they make it a breeze to fill the gaps in my diet without any of the sugars, GMOs, major allergens, synthetic fillers, artificial colorants, and other shady stuff. And I love that it's just two easy capsules a day with Ritual, and they make it even easier. Your multivitamins from Ritual are delivered to your door every month with free shipping always. You can start, snooze, or cancel your subscription anytime. And if you don't love Ritual within your first month, they'll refund your first order. Ritual's clean, vegan-friendly multivitamin is formulated with high quality ingredients in bioavailable forms your body can actually use. You'll always know what nutrients you're taking and where they come from thanks to Ritual's one-oF-A-Kind visible supply chain. Get key nutrients without the BS. Ritual is offering my listeners 10% off during your first three months. Visit ritual.com/greatness to start your ritual today. That's R-I-T-U-A-L.com slash greatness. I'm curious now, you've famously shared this many times before where you've made 10, 15, $20 million and then lost it all down to like 100 bucks and asked parents for like toilet paper and things like that and then made it all, then lost it all. I'm curious, I want to shift the conversation for a second into mindset around poor people versus wealthy people. Because you've been wealthy, you've been poor, you've been both at the same time almost essentially back to back days. What does it take to develop a rich mindset since you've been both poor financially and rich financially? What do you think it takes to develop a rich mindset?

That is such a great question because People don't understand how important that question is. People say to me, James, I need to make a quick $10,000 really fast. What should I do this weekend? That's not the, that's not a reasonable question and there's no answer to that. But mindset is, and it almost sounds like cliche, so I'll get it more practical. But there's so many aspects of mindset, but you have to realize that Money is not, how should I put this? Money is not something you get so you can spend it. Money is a symptom of having a.

Good.

Growth mindset, not a scarcity mindset. So having an abundance mindset. So for instance, this is just an example, but I write down ideas every day. I write down 10 ideas a day, and often I write down ideas for other people. I might write down 10 ideas for Google and I'll send them to Google. And as a result, I've been invited to visit and I visited Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter. I visited all these companies because I share ideas with them. Do you know who Charlamagne tha God is from the Breakfast Club?

Great guy.

So, I once sent him a list during the pandemic. I sent him, Hey man, I heard this recent interview you did with Joe Biden, and there was something you said there that really intrigued me. And so I outlined, just for the fun of it, I sent him an outline of a book I felt he should write. And I said, just ignore this note or do it, I don't care. And he did it and he wanted to involve me. And I said, no, no, no, just do it. You should do this book. And what circumstances happened that I ended up doing it with him, but I really was fine if he had just done it. And people ask me, aren't you afraid of sharing your ideas when people steal your ideas? And yes, sometimes I once shared an investment idea with a billionaire guy who said he would do it with me, and then he didn't, and he made literally hundreds of millions using this idea. And he called me two weeks later and said, oh, it turns out I already did it. And I'm like, how did you already do it when you didn't even hear about it when I told you it? But people steal ideas.

But.

I have an abundance mindset. It's not like this is my only idea ever. I'm gonna constantly, if it was verification that I had good ideas, the fact that he stole it and it worked. So you have to have an abundance mindset about everything. Like some people say, oh, don't have the Starbucks for $7 when you could get on the corner for a dollar. Now, admittedly, some people can't afford the $7, but that's you know, a different category. They shouldn't spend the $7. But in general, most working people can go out and buy a hardcover book or can get an economy premium when they fly instead of just economy. But they're worried about the extra $30 and they figure, oh no, if I save, saving is the same as making. And that's not true because you can't you can make more than 100% of your net worth, but you can only save 100% of your net worth. So it's very different from making money. And so money is just an energy of having good creative ideas, being very sharing your ideas widely, helping other people execute on their ideas, and then wealth and abundance come back naturally as cliche as that sounds. Now, you have to have ideas, you have to have execution ideas, you have to have a strong network, but you get a strong network by having an abundance mindset. So if I'm always sharing ideas with people, Hey, I just read your book. You should do this, this and this to market the book, or this, this and this to monetize the book in different ways, like do a course or do some merchandise or do this. So as long as you're always sharing, you're the person people call when they have an extra opportunity. I call this, I write about this in the book actually, I call this the Google technique. So Google is an interesting website in that when I go to Google and I say Google, can you tell me about what's the best motorcycle I should buy? The first thing Google says to me implicitly is, listen James, we don't know anything about motorcycles, but we've done the homework and here are the top 10 websites you should go to if you want to find out more about motorcycles. and just being honest, these three websites paid us to say this.

Right, right.

And they measure success by how quickly people leave their website. But what website do you go back to when Google, what does this rash mean? Is it something I should worry about? Google's the place you go. So the Google technique, this has made Google, this one idea, this one concept has made Google a trillion and a half dollar value, as opposed to like, oh, we can't tell you about motorcycles unless you subscribe to us or whatever. So by sharing and sending people away from them, that's the best way to create value. So now you can do this technique individually. If someone says, Hey, can you introduce me to someone who could be a co-founder of my company? Sure. Here's this person who's a good programmer. you don't need to pay me anything. Don't worry about it. If you use, you might not be worth a trillion and a half dollars using this technique, but you'll be worth something because there's opportunities always flow back. And it's not woo-woo to say this. It's not like an energy thing, it's a karma thing. It's just that's how abundance mindsets work. And so when I was really depressed about losing all my money, I thought, oh, my gosh, I had won the lottery. I worked really hard for five or six years, and I made a lot of money, and then I blew it all. I had to realize that I didn't win the lottery, that I didn't just get lucky, that I needed to just start coming up with ideas again and exercising my idea muscle. And I was so depressed. And then just a few months of writing down ideas, I felt like my brain was coming alive and like neurons were connecting and it was like magic. And then things started to happen. I started to do things because that's the key really is taking the ideas and then doing something with them. Not all of them because most of the ideas are bad. You're just exercising the idea muscle. But doing stuff, I just came to life again. It was like years of depression and then it was like I was a new person just doing this.

So how do we start to become happy, also healthy and also wealthy, which is kind of like the trifecta of life I feel like everyone wants is happiness, health and wealth?

Yeah, I mean these are all components of what I call, everybody calls it something differently. For me, I call it my daily practice because I feel like I have to improve 1%, even though it's hard to qualify, I have to improve 1% at physical health, emotional health, creative health, spiritual health, every day. So physical health, it might mean doesn't mean go to the gym and lift 500 pounds. It might mean, you know, do an extra push-up, you know, do push-ups every day and do an extra one once a week, you know, or, I mean, you know, improve the number of push-ups every week or, and then take a walk for 20 minutes. It also means sleep well and eat well. Mm-. Emotional health, I have a one strike and you're out policy. If someone treats me really badly once and they don't really have a good reason for it, then they're out. And I just, I might never even call them back again, which is sometimes unfair, but that happens. Creative health, I practice my, I exercise my idea muscle every day. I write down 10 ideas a day. And spiritual health, that's really about not regretting things in the past and not being anxious about things in the future. and to be honest, sometimes that's hard for me. It was hard for me these past three months, but I always made sure this was, this is my daily practice for a reason. It's because these are the moments when I need it to be able to bounce back. You can't bounce back without it. If you're sick in bed, you're not going to have ideas to start a business. If you're fighting with your spouse all day, you're not going to grow your business. You're going to be wasting so much energy fighting. If you're not creative, you can't grow. your career or your wealth or your health or anything. And if you're spending so much of your energy, time traveling, like living in the past with regrets or living in the future with anxieties, you're not going to be able to build the moment right now. So that's really the key is every night I say to myself, did I do it and did I try to improve? And I'll add to that now with this book, am I doing enough experiments so that I'm continuing to explore the world almost like a scientist because there's so many things I don't know about the things that I love. I'm constantly engaged in various experiments.

Have you been applying this daily practice during this last three and a half, four months of, you know, kind of attacks and ups and downs of emotions?

Because I knew I was out of the game a little bit in my mind. So, I made sure physical health, emotional health. It was really hard with the creative health because I feel like I was punished for- Being creative.

Yeah.

It was really hard, but that's where I channeled it. I channeled it somewhat into stand-up comedy because I still did some performances. Even on Zoom, I did some performances. And I channeled it into chess in a big way. But it was hard. I admit it. Now I've been coming out of it bit by bit. and spiritual health. A long time ago, I learned not to have regrets or anxieties. And I just, I think I had a little anxiety going into today because our book is coming out today and I hadn't really done all the marketing I would have liked. But at the end of the day, if your book is good and I believe this is a good book, then you don't need to do as much word of mouth is always the best marketing. I always see people advertise their books on Amazon and I'm like, okay, that's good, but you don't need to advertise if everyone's doing the advertising for you.

Sure. How do you write a book that everyone does the advertising for you?

Well, that's a good question too, because you have to write something that nobody has ever written before, else they could read the other book that someone had written before. Again, a lot of self-help books are like, hey, these academic studies showed X, but they don't really give practical advice. And I always think of persuasion books as the great example. Like, you know, books about, I won't call anyone out, but like, there's all these books that have all these academic studies. If you do this, 70% of the people will say yes. And that doesn't help me. And like, I'll give you a specific technique. that has helped me literally make millions of dollars, which I also lost, but it's helping me make millions. So, like, let's say you're selling a company. The Acquirer, you meet the Acquirer and he eventually asks or she, he eventually asks, how much do you want to sell your company for? What do you value your company at? And I call this the advice technique. I say, listen, I've been head down building this company, working hard. And that's why you want to buy the company is I've worked so hard, my team is great. I have the network, I have the customers, and I do this extra special thing that no one else does. So I've been working really hard at this. You're like the grand master of negotiating buying a company. You've bought like, you've bought like 20 companies and you know how to do this. So I want to work with you and be partners with you for a reason. Because not only do I think we can work well together, but I like you, I admire what you've done. So let me ask your advice just as a friend. What would, what, how would you advise me to answer your question? How would you advise me to, you know, I value your advice. How would you advise me to value my company? Now, once you say that, a, hopefully it's all true. That's why you do want to partner with somebody. And B, you're giving them status. You're giving that, you're saying, look, you're the person I admire enough to ask for advice on this. And they're going, they're not going to give you bad advice. They're not going to say, well, you should value your company at nothing and just let me buy it for free. They know that I'm going to, I'm getting advice from lawyers and accountants, so they know they can't give me bad advice. And Then once they give me advice, and you know, I'll probably throw in there somewhere, like, you know, some people told me to value my company at 300 million.

10X is what I'm making a year. 20, yeah, 5x.

Yeah, yeah. Like, so I'll play around with anchoring a little bit. And so once they give me the advice, then I'm not gonna ask for something or negotiate around that number, and they're not gonna say no, 'cause they just gave me the advice to do that. So this technique is magic, and I have like a dozen technique, that's in the chapter frame control. where again, in a high stakes situation, whether you're arguing with a spouse or you're being a public speaker or you're doing a sale or you're asking for a raise from your boss, one person controls the frame and the other person doesn't. And it's all about how do you control the frame in different situations. So if you give someone the frame, you're still kind of implicitly controlling it. And that that's a critical technique. But again, I've never read that in a self-help book about persuasion because those books don't work. This is just stuff that works specifically for me or let's say many of the people that have been on my podcast that I've interviewed about this.

You've got to, I think that's brilliant. And you've got a couple of chapters about framing and frame control. I'm curious, the 51 rule, how to be infinitely productive. Is that even possible to be infinitely productive?

And if so, Well, okay, so, you know, the four hour, remember the four hour work week by our good friend, Tim Ferriss. So the four hour work week is really a book about the 80 20 rule. And everybody knows the 80 20 rule. It's been around 400 years or so. Some guy realized whenever he planted a garden, 20% of the seeds grew into 80% of the flowers. And it's just like if you have a business with 100 employees, The 80-20 rule always seems to work. It's 20 of the employees create 80% of the revenues. Like that always seems to be the case. In your case with 15 employees, probably 20% of the three of them probably create 80% of the revenues. It works everywhere. The thing about the 80-20 rule is you can apply it to itself. So what's the 80-20 rule? So if you take that 20%, which of those 20 people are creating 80% of those profits. So it turns out four are creating 64% of the profits. I don't want to get too mathematical. Applying it one more time, one person probably create you, in this case, for your own business, probably creates 50% of the revenues. So when I gave you the Scrabble technique of learn the two letter words or the Monopoly technique of buy the orange properties, you only need that 1% of knowledge about the skills of Monopoly to, to, that will result in at least 50% of your wins. Just that one.

That's be dangerous. Yeah.

Right. So, so with the 51 rule, you could take any area of life and try to find the 1%. Now, people try to do the 80 20 rule. They want to make as much, you know, benefit as possible. 80%. But again, to be in the top 1%, you just need to win 50% of your, you know, more, a little more than 50% of your games. and you're probably one of the best. So, you know, the 1% rule, if you can narrow down to that 1%, and you can through experimenting, which is covered in another chapter, you can figure out what's the 1% that creates 50% of the value.

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So I'll give you an example. A friend of mine is 27 years old. And somehow he 27 years old is very young for a comedian. Like again, someone like Dave Chappelle, it's been doing it for 20 years. Jerry Seinfeld was doing it for 15 years before he had his TV show. And but this one guy I know, he can perform at any club he wants in the world. And he's 27. He's been doing comedy just a few years. So what did he do? He found his he found the 51 rule. He found his 1%. and what he does is during his act, he'll ask the audience, just throw out five random words. They'll throw out, he did it with me in the middle of my podcast. So we threw out words like volcanoes on Venus, and the Mayan civilization, and the James Altucher, and we threw out a bunch of completely different topics. And then he said to the audio guy, okay, give me a wrap beats. And so a beat started going and instantly he had the most insanely intelligent and fast rap using all five of those words. And it was completely different than any other rap he'd ever done because I've seen a lot of his YouTube videos. And that was the 1% he needed combined with some standup comedy skill where he's welcome at any club in the universe.

He does something different and unique that no one else can do. And he's not the best comedian. He's not going to be Jerry Seinfeld at his game, but he created his.

Own game to skip the line.

Right.

So he and he literally skipped the line. And, you know, and I do the same thing in the sense that nobody, because I haven't been doing, you always want to use your weaknesses to your advantages. Because I haven't been doing comedy 20 years, what have I been doing? Well, I've been making money and losing millions of dollars and making a fool out of myself and doing all these, I have all these insane stories from that. and that's my unique flavor, which allows me to skip the line. Again, all of these are parts of the overall picture of skipping the line, but that's my use of the 51 rule.

And how do we, we've all got 24 hours in a day, but how do we borrow hours? How do we gain more time?

So let's say, Louis, you're a public speaker, right? You've done a You've done, let's call it 10,000 hours of public speaking, okay? Between preparing and going to and arranging and, and then actually doing the speaking and then the Q&A afterwards. Well, let's say now you wanted to try doing standup comedy. I'm just using this as an example. You could borrow hours from what you learned in public speaking and put them into standup comedy. So you don't, that skips the line on maybe 2000 hours of standup comedy.

Because you've already been on stage, you know how to prepare, you know how to interact with an audience, and now it's learning different stuff. Yeah. You're not saying you might not be.

As good at interacting with the audience as a standup comedian, but you're 20% of the way there. I would say what's interesting to me is going in the other direction after I did standup comedy for even just a few months and then I had to do a regular public talk about business or investing or whatever, it 10x'd my public speaking.

Really?

Unbelievable. Yeah, I don't even I don't even have to prepare a talk. I could just go in there And I used to be scared to death public speaking. I was the first time you and I met, we were going to talk.

I remember in Canada, right?

Yeah, at Jason Gaignard's Mastermind Talks. You probably don't know this. I think you spoke right before me. I was so scared five minutes before I was supposed to speak, I left the conference center. I just left and I wasn't going to go back. I was going to, I called my wife and I said, I'm gone. I'm going to the airport. Sorry. You better come out and join me if you want. You can listen to the talks. And she was like, Nah, just come back. What could have hurt? But she was ready to go. She was ready to go. But then I decided to go back and I had a fun time.

And you were great. I remember, you're very memorable.

But I was so terrified, man. And I'm always so terrified. But now it's the comedy is much more terrifying.

Way more terrifying.

That is hours I borrowed from comedy to do public speaking now.

I've always said if I wanted to truly become like one of the best, I'm okay, speak. I'm good. You know, I'm like, I'm not bad, but I'm not like I watch other people. I'm just like, they are masters. They are incredible speakers. They captivate. It's like they know exactly the pacing, timing, tonality. Unbelievable. crowd or audience engagement, everything. And I'm like, okay, I've worked hard to get overcome my fears to get to a certain level, but I'm not at that level. But I've always said to myself, if I truly wanted to match this, I need to do improv. I need improv or comedy and do something else that's just going to scare the crap out of me and then use that skill to apply it to public speaking.

So here's a 50 slash one technique. So even before I was doing standup comedy, for years before I was doing it, I would, before every talk I ever gave, I would watch on YouTube standup comedians because they are the best public speakers. Like if their faces are moving, they're moving around the stage, they know they have the right cadence, they know when to pause, they are the best public speakers. And you have mirror neurons in your brain which it's almost like an injection of, let's say I was watching Dave Chappelle. It was almost like I'd be injecting Dave Chappelle into my veins for a good half hour if I watch a YouTube video of him. And then I could go do my talk and I'll have my mirror neurons will trigger and some of my motions, some of the ways in which I'll pause or move my eyes will mimic his motions. And it's useful. It's useful in comedy whether you're trying to get a visceral reaction from people and it's great in public speaking.

I'm loving all this, man. I'm a huge fan of experimentation in our life and being the scientist of our own life and putting ourselves through games, exercises, challenges, experiments to overcome our fears and insecurities because I believe that when we overcome those fears, we can become really much more unstoppable in accomplishing our goals and becoming in the top 10%, 1%, earning more money, having more courage and relationships and feeling overall happy and healthy.

This is like the first time in my life I got burnt out a little bit for the past three months. It might be a good thing or a bad thing. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it prevented me from doing my normal activities.

What'd you get burnt out from?

In general, I diversify my activities. so I get joy and happiness from as many activities as possible. But of course, anything that's important to you and anything that's worth doing is not always a happy activity. So for instance, let's say you love playing tennis, you might have a day where you lose every tennis game. That's just a normal thing. But because you love doing it, you're able to find the energy to come back the next day and say, you know, I had a bad day, my forehand was I wasn't holding the racket correctly or I wasn't as powerful enough, but I love this and I'm going to play it again today and learn and get better and maybe even take a lesson or two. And so I have several of these activities. Like if investing doesn't go one day, then I can do writing. If writing, I don't feel so good about one day, I could do go out and do standup comedy or come up with ideas for a business or do a podcast or play a game of chess or whatever. And I had this, I wrote this article in August where it was my most popular article ever. It like oddly went viral on the.

Is this the, the article about Seinfeld?

Well, the article about New York City.

Oh, yeah.

Which Seinfeld then responded to.

And that was a crazy whirlwind, man.

It was a crazy whirlwind because about 30 million people read the article. and that was actually several months ago. So now maybe it's more, but, and, and then a week, and then I had a huge response. And then 10 days later, people think it was like the next day, Seinfeld responded 10 days later, Seinfeld wrote an entire page in the New York Times.

And basically calling you an idiot.

Yeah. And that was his whole point rather than actually, like, I love New York and I was writing this so people wouldn't be in denial. And of course, and everything I had said in the article has basically come true and is still coming true. And it's scary. And I wanted to help people. I, I spoke with Congress. I shared, you know, just the facts, how, you know, violence was going up. Office buildings, which at that time were allowed to be open, were only five percent full. So what was the reason? Restaurants, like 80 of restaurants were in danger of closing. And by the way, probably about 80 of restaurants now in New York City have closed or are about to close. Broadway was closed indefinitely, which means, and I don't care about Broadway, I hate Broadway. The last show I saw was, I don't know, Beauty and the Beast with my kids and I fell asleep in the middle of it. I just can't stand Broadway since I was a kid. But there's hundreds or thousands of hotels and restaurants that are part of the ecosystem of Broadway, plus there's tourism taxes, their sales taxes and so on. So the fact that Broadway is not open is devastating to the city. Seinfeld made fun of me, one of his comments was, oh, poor guy, can't see a Broadway show. I don't care about that. I care about the suffering that happens when all of these restaurants go out of business and all these people are hurt. And so anyway, I'm defending myself here, but I got so much hate.

You got a lot of hate.

Never hate in any way. Now, of the 30 million people who read it, maybe 29 million loved it or agreed with it or thought, huh, interesting, and then moved on with their lives because they're normal people. But the 1 million who hated it were mostly from New York City and they went into sort of some kind of cognitive dissonance where it's like they didn't even read, they were in denial, which was the reason I was writing the article. Including Jerry, who loves the city as well, and he had good intentions.

And.

I got trashed so much. I had never, I've been trashed before for over the past 20 years of writing. I've, of course, been, you only want to write something that's unique. If you write something that other people have written, then why are you writing? So I wrote something that's unique to me. I had some theories that were new in the article. I don't have to get into all of them, but, and I also don't hit publish unless I'm a little bit afraid what people will think of me. So in this case, I was a little afraid because I'm usually an optimist. And this was one time where I really didn't know the solutions. And I spoke to congressmen, mayoral candidates, I even spoke to the Federal Reserve about how New York City could get bailed out. And that's how much I care. But nobody seemed to like address these things. And then I just got completely... So I wrote this, I didn't expect it to go viral. It immediately went viral. The most viral thing I've ever seen, really, in terms of text writing. And up until November, December, even not so much today, but November, December, people were still trashing me in Twitter, on emails, in Facebook, every single day. And a couple other things were going on that I just didn't feel as good about. So suddenly, like all my sources of dopamine were punishing me. So like in writing is the thing, I've been writing every day since 1990 and I love writing. I love it. I love it as an art form. I love it as a way to communicate. I've studied it. I've really made it an art and a science for myself. and suddenly writing was punishing me in a way that it had never had before. So every time I would sit down to write, my brain would say, no, no, no, no, no. This is dangerous for you. And I literally, I almost physically couldn't sit down at the computer and, and do it. So that also meant I stopped social media. I stopped Twitter, I stopped Facebook, I stopped emails, I stopped even texting on my phone. I stopped looking at my phone. And I wasn't depressed. Everyone thought I was depressed because I wasn't normal. But sometimes you just need a break or you need to say, is this what I asked for? Is this what I want in life? And you, it gives you a chance to reevaluate things. And I had worked really hard last year writing. I had written two books, actually, and, and hundreds of articles and, and you know, I went all out on the podcast and, you know, I was still doing stand-up comedy and suddenly I just got, for the first time, maybe 15, 16 years, my body was telling me I need a break. And so I took a break, but it was right at the point where, you know, this book that I, that just came out, I feel is my most valuable book ever. It's like this development from my other books and I wanted to market it, but I just wasn't doing anything. I wasn't doing anything at all. I was doing podcasts just to maintain, and I have businesses that I run, and about 100 or so people depend on me to keep going. So I did what I needed to do, but that was about it.

When you came out with that article, I remember thinking, Congrats, because this blew up. And I was like, Wow, good for you. You deserve to get the attention. and you have some thoughtful points that I was like, yeah, this makes sense. However, if I was living in New York City, I'd be probably like, man, screw you, you know, defend my city. But I was like, yeah, he's got some great, valid points. And I hope everyone sees this. And then when I saw kind of the attention and the positive, but also the attacks on you, I was like, man, I really hope you're going to be taking care of your emotional health, your mental health, and just protecting your energy. How were you able to manage or protect that energy or were you not able to because the negative million comments were so painful that it finally broke through?

Yeah, I guess it finally broke through. I mean, I used to think I had a pretty strong armor. I don't care what people have to say about my writing or me because most people are strangers to me. But I think if you truly don't care what people think, then there's probably Something wrong with you? Because eventually this got to the point where I had I was losing friends and I was losing family members. Really? Family members would write articles trashing me. No. Yeah. And then I would see who liked their articles and it would be like employees of mine from 20 years ago or ex-girlfriends. One ex-girlfriend did write about me an article and everybody was just lying too and nobody was addressing the actual issue, which I did care about New York City living, not dying. I wanted people not to be in denial. And how did I take care of myself? Well, normally I always take care of my physical health, my emotional health, like who's, you know, surround myself with good people, my creative health, my spiritual health. It was a little challenging, though, at some points. Here's what I decided to do. It was really just take a break. I hadn't taken a break in a really long time, even for one day. But I didn't fully take a break. My book, Skip the Line, just came out and it has all these techniques in it, which we could talk about at some point. But I decided I'm going to use the techniques I wrote about to get really great at something I love doing, but I haven't done it in a while. So as a kid, this is going to sound dorky or whatever, but as a kid I was and I still am a ranked chess master. But I last studied the game in 1997, like 24 years ago. And so my ability, I always say I'm a chess master, but my ability has actually severely gone down. Just like I'm sure if you haven't played, you know, Football.

Football, yeah.

20 years, not only does age factor in, but you just physically, those muscles go away. And so I decided I'm going to use the skip the line techniques and only those techniques, and I'm going to get better than I ever was at chess. So I used every single chapter in the book, which it can be applied to any field of life. It can be applied to business, entrepreneurship, golf, being a chef, whatever you want. So I applied it to getting better than I ever was before at chess.

And did you get better?

I did. Yeah, I'm at the best level I've ever been at. And it took a solid three and a half months, which is good because probably it should have taken years and years, which is how long it took me originally.

And how did you become... What technique did you use to strengthen your skills to become the best you've ever been?

So, so I use, so, so I use every technique in the book. The first thing was, and, and again, I'll say this General enough that it applies to everything. First thing was, is I did a plus-minus equal. I write about this in the book, but it was originally told to me by Frank Shamrock, who's a 10-time MMA winner, world champion. He had to learn very quickly every martial art, so, so. The goal is, is how do you get to be in the top 1% of any field you want? And more importantly, or just as importantly, how do you monetize it? Because there's all these self-help books about how to, oh, you're gonna learn fast or whatever, but it's, it's not good enough to just be the top 1%. You have to make money too, or else you can't keep doing it.

So otherwise, just a hobby. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and Frank, Frank Shiemrock told me about this, but then I elaborate even further on the plus-minus equal. And so a plus is a coach who you get lessons from and gives you feedback on your play and so on. The equals are your peers who are just as good as you at the field or you're all rising up together and you exchange ideas, kind of like in 2014, you, me, and a handful of others, we were starting podcasting, we were early podcasters, and we would all call each other and exchange ideas. We weren't competition. We really helped each other a lot.

These are your training mates, your teammates, people that are striving for something similar.

And then the minus is this concept that if you can't explain something simply, then you don't really understand it. So I have a story. This guy, when I went to graduate school, the dean of the school threw me out. I was thrown out of graduate school. I wasn't a good student and whatever. But then after he threw me out in a weird set of circumstances, this is 1992, I started giving him chess lessons. So I called him up. He's now the dean at Georgia Tech. And I said, Hey, do you want chess lessons again? So he became my minus. And so I was taking lessons from an extremely strong player. And I was teaching lessons, which actually was just as valuable as taking valuable as taking lessons. So that was one technique and it worked really well.

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That's your plus.

That you have people you are working with or collaborating with in some level or training with or whatever to support your growth together and then have someone you can help lift up.

Right, exactly. Because when you explain basic concepts to a student, the minus is kind of subtly important. People don't always understand that. But when I explain the basic concepts of why some particular move is bad, It helps me really understand it at a much deeper level. And I find myself thinking that while I'm playing now that, oh, I don't want to create a weakness here. I might not have thought about that six months ago, but now I really think about these weaknesses that show up.

And you hear about that a lot where the best way to learn something and master something is to be able to teach it in an easy way to other people. And the more you teach it, the more you understand it.

It's so valuable. And the other thing about plus-minus equals is that With anything in life, there's two areas that are important for mastery. There are learning the skills, and there's also, and people miss this part, there's understanding the field. Let's say, Louis, you were the best interviewer. You had the skills, and you do. You have the skills of an incredible interviewer. But if you don't know the field of podcasting, like how to distribute your podcast, how to market your podcast, what's the best recording equipment. If you don't know the field, you're still going to be a horrible podcaster. So there's the skills and there's the field. And so plus minus equals also helps you by, you know, by communicating with a coach who's a great player or a podcast or a businessman and by working with your peers who are also growing up and by doing the minus, you also build your network and they all know different parts of the field as well. So you learn more about the field while you're doing this as well. So I learned that the field of chess, oddly, has changed a lot since I last studied the game. I mean, it's changed remarkably because of computers and online networks and so on. So that was one technique, one among many. There's 23 different chapters in the book. And another technique that's very important is I call this the 10,000 experiment rule. So, you're familiar with the 10,000 hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell?

Yep.

So, it's this idea that, of course, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice helps you to become the top, it helps you master your field, whether it's piano or, again, golf or standup comedy or sales or whatever. And, you know, I hate this rule. I, and I don't believe in it. I don't think it takes, and you've proven to me actually, it doesn't take 10,000 hours to be, to master something. That would take 20 years. And I've seen you pick up sports, and a year later you're like in the Olympics for that sport. Right, right, right.

Yeah, I've learned, I mastered, I mean, I wouldn't say I mastered, but I, in salsa dancing, it took me three and a half months of 100% all in-ness on studying it, on practicing private lessons, watching videos, listening to music. going out and applying it four times a week took three and a half months to where I felt like, okay, I'm fluent in salsa dancing. And it was painful and embarrassing and scary. All these, it was hard. It was like tons of time and energy. And then I would say it was another six months where maybe within a full year, I was like, I can dance with the greatest dancers in the world confidently. I'm never gonna, I'm not gonna be the best in the world. But I can dance with the best in the world and feel good and understand the language and know where they're going and they know where I'm going in a year, you know? But it doesn't take 10 years.

And you know, there is so much to unpack there. The first thing is, it's what I said earlier, anything that's really worth doing is, you're not, it's not about happiness. It's worth doing, but it's gonna make you unhappy some of the time. It's gonna be like, I love television. television makes me happy all the time. But I, but it, it may, it's useless. It makes no sense that that's what you're gonna do all your life.

Right.

Watch TV.

Right.

So those, the category of things that make you happy is different from the things that you try to get good at because they, you're not going to get happy while you're trying to get better because it's hard and you're going to meet resistance. And the people who don't have, like, that growth mindset to handle that resistance will, will never, never Master it. The other thing to unpack there is you don't have to be the top 10 in the world. No one could tell the difference probably. You just refer to it. Probably a beginner, I'll call them a civilian, in salsa dancing. The civilians of salsa dancing can't tell the difference between the greatest dancer and you when you're dancing with them. You look like you have the same level of ability. and this was a realization for me. I was riding in a cab a few years ago, and this is about chess again, but my cab driver told me he played chess. And I said, oh, that's nice. You know, I play a little as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I figured he was just, like, you know, an average player, and, and I wasn't gonna get into it. And then he told me, like, no, no, no, really. I was the national champion of Turkey. And I'm like, oh, and then we started really getting into it. I'm like, what's your, what's your rating? And he said this remarkably high rating. He was like a great player. He was what's called an international master and I'm a national master. Wow. He was another he was two like levels higher than me, which is took him like probably six more years of work. And he even said that it took me probably six more years from the point where I was a master to this. And you know what? Nobody could tell the difference probably between him and me. If they saw him playing and they saw me playing, There's zero chance a civilian could tell the difference.

It's little nuances that only the greatest.

Could see, like, oh, okay, I see the difference. Right. Like, if I was playing him, he could probably beat me statistically. It's all done statistically. He could beat me two out of three times. I could tell why he's better than me. But no one else would be able to tell who particularly people who aren't, you know, people who are amateur players. And it's the same thing with stand-up comedy. Dave Chappelle is the best in the world, or Louis CK might be the.

Best in the world, or Amy Schumer.

Whoever it is that they're like. Or whatever, yeah. Yeah, but if I'm performing to a crowd that likes me, and you only see these people perform in front of crowds that like them, if I'm performing a show and everyone's laughing the entire time, no one would be able to tell at this point the difference between me and, you know, a truly great comedian. The reason I know this is I've performed after these people on lineups and no one could tell. People have come up to me and said, oh, man, you were the best in the lineup. They didn't know who that it was Chris Rock right before me. Bill Burr or someone like that. And I killed it even more. Now that sometimes I bomb, sometimes I kill it. But that's why I say being in the top 1% is much faster and much more important than being the top 10 in the world. Like you want to get to the top of the learning curve, but you don't really need to go on that slow plateau to be the best in the world.

Because that does take 10, 5, 10, 12 more years to be in the top. whatever, 20 in the world.

Right. And so I just wanted to get better than I was at chess. So I know for a fact I'm in the top 1%, but I'm not in the top 100 players because I didn't devote 30 years of my life to it. But I know enough that I could appreciate the nuances and it's a great game and it's a great culture. Same thing with stand-up comedy, same thing with investing and writing is probably the one area I've and podcasting where I put in 10,000 hours. But, and I wonder if you'll resonate with this, this is an important technique. I kept grappling with the 10,000 hour rule, particularly when it came to stand up comedy. Like, what does it mean even to do deliberate practice in stand up comedy? How do you measure it? So I called up the original professor Anders Ericsson who developed, did all the research on violinists, mathematicians, chess players, I actually was part of the experiments in the early 90s on the 10,000 hour rule. And how can we do this with comedy? And he said, well, how do you judge it? Is it laughs per minute? Is it money? Is it... What is it? And I'm like, I don't know. There's no real straightforward metric. So he just couldn't figure it out. And that's the problem with the 10,000 hour rule. So I started looking at other successful people. I started looking at all the times I've switched careers. I've switched careers like six or seven times. and I came up with something I call the 10,000 experiment rule. And I wonder if you'll resonate this was in Salsa, is that every time I avoided repetition, which is more about the 10,000 hour rule, just repeat, repeat, repeat, and get feedback every time, I decided every time I do comedy or every time I play chess or every time I start a business or make an investment, I'm gonna do at least one experiment in what I'm doing. And by experimenting, you learn so much more quickly because the nature of an experiment is that you're trying something that nobody's ever tried before, or at least you've never tried before. So not only are you doing this activity that you love and want to get better at, but part of what you're doing, you've never done before. So your worst case scenario is the experiment fails, but that you learn something. Thomas Edison famously did try 10,000 different filaments to make a light bulb. A reporter asked him, How does it feel to fail 10,000 times? And he said, Sir, I did not fail 10,000 times. I learned 10,000 different ways to not make a light bulb. And I wonder if that resonates with you in the salsa dancing. Did you kind of experiment a little bit?

Absolutely. I mean, I was more just terrified because I had no clue what I was doing and I was entering a whole new world, new culture, new language and I was never a dancer. So I definitely experimented in a safe environment where I would watch YouTube tutorials and then I would practice by myself in the mirror until I felt like, okay, I understand the concept enough. Now let me go try this at the nightclub without embarrassing myself fully and making it a horrible experience with my partner because it's got to be with someone else that you're interacting with. And I just didn't want to make Them look bad the whole time. So I was like, I need to at least have the basics and I experiment in the mirror by myself. And then I was also a truck driver at the time. So I was making $250 a week.

Truck driving six hours a day in Ohio.

This was two months ago. No salsa dancing. I'm just kidding. Yeah, yeah. This was in 2007, 2008. And, and I would do mental rehearsal. I would just imagine myself dancing for those six hours. I had a CD of the greatest salsa hits. of the time that I was listening to in the truck. And, I would, I would imagine myself dancing and doing the moves. And then I would apply, I would do group classes, private classes, and, then practice it at clubs, like live interacting, like a game. And, I would experiment all these things. I would experiment like how much pressure to give with your partner, you know, how fast to spin until I figured out, oh, they liked this. Oh, this felt right. But it was all about experimentation. And I'm doing this right now. I'm actually been doing six months of Spanish lessons one-on-one and it's been the most, probably the most painful and challenging thing I've ever done. Hard, even harder than salsa, because it's just so hard in my brain. It's just like this.

I'm gonna learn another language. I don't know any other languages.

Man, it is. It is hard on the brain, but I'm experimenting. different ways on how to learn. And I first tried classes at night. And it was so hard to retain information because I was, I would work out, I do a full day of podcasts and work on my team that I had no energy to think. And so then I was like, let me do in the morning. So now I'm doing early morning and it's been drastically better by just changing the time of when I'm practicing. And that's been a game changer. I'm also I learn best when I'm moving, when I'm like physically in action. So now I'm doing it when I'm running, I put the headphones on and I'm listening and I feel like I'm remembering because I'm moving my body and not just sitting stationary. So I'm experimenting within the language on how to learn and practice, but it's been challenging, man.

Yeah, and like another example experiment might be go to the area of your town which is the most populated by Hispanic people and see if you could only speak Spanish. That's a type of experiment. So with comedy, for instance, in the very beginning, I was having a problem if people talked back at me from the crowd. I wasn't as good with what's called crowd work. And so I decided to do stand-up comedy on a subway. So I went on a subway car.

That is ballsy.

Yeah, and so because you have to do it. If you want to skip the line, which is what the book's called, you have to do things that everybody else in line is not doing. So I would go in a subway car, and of course, by definition, it's a hostile audience. And they don't want to be bothered.

They're getting bothered all the time. They just want to focus and listen to the music and go on.

Right, and also, I don't have a lot of time with them, too. So this was a way to experiment to tighten up my jokes so I could get to the punchline as fast as possible. And so every stop, I would switch subway cars. So I would, I did this for like two hours and it really helped improve me deal with hostile audiences and tighten up my punch lines and also be a little bit more fearless. And so that was an example experiment, but I've done many experiments like that in, in comedy. I do experiments at any given point. I've got like 5 to 10 experiments going on and I've, I've experimented in writing. in business, in sales, in persuasion techniques, and in chess, for instance, these past three months, I did a huge experiment. I threw out all the ways I had been playing for the past, since I was 18 years old. There's something called an opening, how you open the game, sort of defines the game. I used to play these very safe, conservative openings. So I threw that out the window.

And.

I do the exact opposite. I play the most hyper aggressive, tricky, complicated openings. And I realized it opened my eyes. It was a whole different game and it gave me a much more holistic view of the game and a much different style of play. And now it's mixed with my conservative style. So it was an experiment that was useful. Another one in comedy is, Let's say a great comedian like Chris Rock was performing that night and there's a lineup of usually five or six comedians. Chris Rock walks in and of course they give him a spot because he's Chris Rock. So let's say he was performing.

Have you been on stage with Chris Rock before or before on the same night?

No, but I've been on stage with a lot of famous comedians. Tracy Morgan. So I'll use a real example. Tracy Morgan or Bill Burr. Tracy Morgan's a great comedian. He was on 30 Rock. Bill Burr is one of the most, the greatest comedians of all time. and I've been on the stage with quite a few well-known comedians. And the booker, the manager, would always say, listen, Bill Burr's going up tonight, or Tracy Morgan's going up tonight. Do you want to go before Tracy Morgan, or do you want to go up after Tracy Morgan? And all of the comedians say, I have to go before Tracy Morgan. I am not going up after Tracy Morgan. Because after Tracy Morgan, the audience is like, oh my God, that was Tracy Morgan. And also he's so funny, and they're sending, photographs to their friends and family. I just saw Tracy Morgan. And then who's this guy coming up? We don't have to listen to him. He's not Tracy Morgan. So I would always say, I want to go up immediately after Bill Burr, Tracy Morgan, TJ Miller, whoever it is. I want to go up immediately after them. Jerry Seinfeld, I've been up immediately after.

No way.

And it's hard. But that is the way you skip the line. Everyone else who's on the line went up before. I'm the one who has to, there's no downside. I don't know what people are afraid of being no good one night, but you're going to learn so much. Like this is what it's like to deal with an audience that's not focused on you. And how do you get their focus? This is a big challenge for a comedian. There's a saying, either the comedian controls the frame or the audience controls the frame, not both. And the audience can see if you're nervous, they're like x-rays. so it, it, it, I improved my leaps and bounds because of that experiment of always going up after the best comedian on the lineup. And some, some comedians were hard to go up after, some were not. But it was, but I learned every time.

So what does it mean to skip the line in general in order to achieve your goals and dreams? Is it putting yourself through challenging experiences and experiments in order to gain the skills that most people aren't able to gain in a quick amount of time?

Right, so a little bit is that. So one technique is a 10,000 experiment rule. But in general, here's what it is. Let's say, you know, right now, there's two groups of people. This is four basically. So right now, 55 million people this past year filed for unemployment.

Wow.

So as safe as they thought corporations were, corporations were not. They all were fired or laid off temporarily or whatever it was, and they filed for unemployment. so people started thinking, well, I was tired of being an accountant anyway. I was tired of being a dental assistant. Maybe I want to be a chef. Maybe I want to do something related to sports or something that I love.

And.

But, but, and then everyone says, this is what everybody says. And I'm sure people have said this to you throughout your career. People will say, James, you, you can't do that. You're, you're 45 years old when I started doing comedy for instance. you're 45 years old. You can't do this. People have been doing this for 20 years. How are you gonna pay your mortgage? How are you gonna take care of your kids? You can't skip the line. I had one time, I had a comedian tell me, James, James, James, you can't literally said, you can't skip the line. You gotta do open mics, then you gotta do this spot, this spot, this spot.

You gotta pay your dues. You gotta show up.

He said, you gotta pay your dues.

You gotta pay the reps. Eat crap. Yeah.

And while he was saying it, the manager at the club said, James, you're up. I was doing my first 60-minute show and this guy was trying to get me down right before my show. And because people are just like jealous and insecure, they don't want you to change. They like you being below them, behind them in line. They don't want you to change. That's why they say you can't do it. And they didn't do it. They've been doing it for 25 years while driving you know, whatever, doing being a plumber while doing comedy on the side or doing investing on the side or whatever it is. So, so this is really people had to change. People said to themselves, why can't I do what I love? Why can't I do what I'm passionate about? And, you know, screw all the people who say you can't do it. Like, I want to do it. And so this book is, is really here's how you do it. So that's super fast. Again, not only are you in the top 1% in the world of something that you love doing, but you also understand how to monetize it. So you understand about persuasion and not BS persuasion. Like in this academic study, we show that if you mirror how somebody moves their hands, they'll agree with you on everything. Like that's all BS. I just talk about, I talk about frame control, which is basically how to control the frame in high-stakes situations. And I use techniques that have worked for me and made me money. And I have a chapter on that. Explore the world's hidden wonders on the Atlas Obscura Podcast, a village in India where everyone's name is a song, a boiling river in the Amazon, a spacecraft cemetery in the middle of the ocean. Every day, the Atlas Obscura Podcast will blow your mind in 15 minutes. You can find it on the SiriusXM app, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to follow the show so you never miss an episode. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void?

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So skipping the line is all, there's like 23 different techniques and some of them are related to the field, some of them are related to mastering the skills. Here, here's another example. Micro skills. So there's no such skill as investing. Investing is a meta skill that's really made up of a bunch of independent micro skills. So for instance, options trading is one skill, value investing is one skill. The psychology of investing is a skill because half the days you're gonna make money, half the days you're gonna lose money and it feels really bad to lose money. So you have to you have to deal with psychology. Money management is a skill. There's about 20 different micro skills to investing. And so by breaking apart the micro skills and picking the ones that you love the most and the ones that you feel you have a head start on, you could get much faster to the finish line than viewing investing as one giant skill. And this is true for anything interesting, like even Tennis is about forehand, backhand, the net game. Again, the psychology, there's a little bit of reading your opponent, so you know, oh, he's having trouble with his backhand, so you just pound the backhand. And most things worthwhile are meta skills and made up of a bunch of micro skills. Comedy is humor, likability, crowd work, stage work, mic work, reading the audience, you know, understanding what the bookers are looking for. So, you know, everything you could think of that's worth doing is a collection of micro skills. So that's another thing I write about. And I'm only getting to a few of these techniques, but they're all, you recognize them when you hear them that, oh yeah, that does work. And when you think about it concretely like this instead of more intuitively, It allows you to apply it more directly. So for me, instead of just haphazardly figuring out in these past three months when I was doing this experiment with skip the line techniques to get better at chess, I directly use these techniques. Like I broke chess down into the micro skills because there is no skill just called chess. There's 10 different micro skills and I studied each one to make sure I was sharp in it. and same thing for business and negotiation and persuasion and so on. That's essentially skipping the line. There's one other thing about your salsa dancing that I want to talk about and unpack. You loved it, right? That's why you were doing it. That's why you were almost obsessed about it. And there's an important thing about loving what you do. Again, it's not about happiness. It's about if you love doing something during those difficult moments, it doesn't require as much energy to do it the next day. So if I don't love, let's say I don't love writing, okay, but I want to be a successful writer for some reason. If I don't love it, it's going to be hard to sit down and write. That's going to require energy every single day. But if you love writing, you're going to It's, you're gonna be able to take that energy that you would have used to convince yourself to write, you're gonna be able to put that energy into the writing. We have a limited amount of energy each day, which is why we sleep at night. So if you, you have to be able to take whatever energy you have and apply it to the skill. If part of that energy is used to just convince you to sit down and do it, then you're not gonna.

Be as successful as the person who loves what they're doing. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm curious, when did you learn the skill of overcoming the fear of embarrassment? Because I feel like that's a lot of it, the psychology of just being okay with not being liked or with being laughed at or being made fun of or not being the best right away. Did you ever learn that skill or is that something you're constantly trying to learn?

I would say, well, everything is constant. And this is one of the great things, again, about doing an activity that's worthwhile. I bet you the more you learned about salsa, you realize the more you have to learn.

Yeah, of course.

As you understand the nuances, the nuances never stop. They exponentially grow the more you learn. And I've been writing my opinions and my stories for 20 years. And every article I write, because I always try to put my own unique spin on it, otherwise, why write it? Somebody or many people laugh at me or hate me or argue with me. I mean, people show up at my house and argue with me. And people call me on the phone constantly and argue with me, but particularly recently, or when I wrote about just different issues about... And even when I wrote my story about going broke and then bouncing back, people always made fun of me. I don't know. I would say I've never fully learned it, but I got better and better at it. And you just never really get over completely. But with this New York City article, I didn't mind the million people who were just calling me names or whatever on Twitter. But it really hurt me when I saw people I knew and I thought, imagine you had helped somebody. Let's say you had lent somebody.

I know about, I mean, this has happened to me in the past where I've helped lots of people and then things happen and then they come against you or you see them saying nasty things about you online on people's stuff. And that is hurtful because you're like, why don't you just reach out to me directly and have a conversation with me? Why are you writing stuff or commenting on other people's stuff, saying negative things about me behind my back? That is hurtful.

It is hurtful. And it had never really, I mean, it had happened to me before. But never to this extent, like I had friends who themselves lost friends because they defended me on this article. Like literally they were unfriended on Facebook by good friends of theirs after defending me in this article. Or again, you know, I had ex-employees who when they were practically homeless, I gave them a job or when, you know, family members who I had, you know, helped make a lot of money or an ex-girlfriend who Some relationships end, there was nothing bad that happened, it just ended.

And.

It was, I don't want to complain about it because again, there was one, there's the positive aspect, which is, hey, my writing was so impactful that it impacted people to do these things, even Jerry Seinfeld. But at the same time, I think my brain reacted I was doing without me realizing it. And it said, hey, my brain was basically telling me, if you write something, the world's gonna punish you. Or if you, you know, we got to the point, even when I was doing performing comedy on the stage, the article was spreading into the audience, and people were commenting. So my brain reacted to that. And it's been about three and a half months of that. And so I decided, okay, I'm not gonna I realized what was happening. I'm not gonna, and this has happened to me before and usually it means a big change is gonna happen in my life at some point. And so I recognize that. And I'm back to writing again, but again, I decided to use this time productively. The Queen's Gambit TV show had just come out.

I was amazing, man. I watched it. It was amazing.

Oh, yeah, 62 million people watched it the first week. and I saw that on all the chess platforms, they had quadrupled or even more in users at any given moment. And so I figured, you know what? People are interested in this and people are interested in stream, like, there are chess streamers who have more followers than the best comedians that I follow, which is like, I would not have believed that stream chess streamers would beat out the best entertainers in the world on YouTube. But so I figured, okay, I'm gonna learn this and document my progress, but I'm gonna put skin in the game. I'm gonna only use the techniques in my book, Skip the Line. And it's been working so far. I am by far better than I was at my peak. And I was, I'm not bragging because it's all a ranking system. I was very strong on my peak. I was already in the top 1% at my peak. But I probably was only in the top 10% six months ago, and now I'm solidly top 1% again. And I enjoy the game so much more because I learned it using this way, breaking it down into these plus-minus-equals experiments, micro skills, and the various other techniques in the book.

If I was your minus, how much do you think you could help me? I'm a beginner. I mean, I'm like, play once every five years for fun, have no idea. I understand like, okay, one opening, I don't even know what they mean. I know how to move the chess pieces. And I've won games against amateurs that didn't know the game like me. How good could you make me? In a day? How good could I become with from nothing essentially, just like what I've learned on my own to one day of training from you.

One day of training, I can make you.

Can I get in the top 20% in the world?

No, that I can't do in one day. That would take, but I could do that in a few months. But in one day, I can make you as good as, let's say, a tournament player. So you've played people like your friends.

Who don't know chess. Yeah.

Yeah, you've played your friends who don't know chess. To be a tournament player, you have to have a certain level of skill. Like you have to have maybe studied it a little bit and enough to want to sign up for a tournament and play other people who are serious. So that's not a high level, but we're talking just one day. So, but maybe that's in the top, you know, certain percentage, I don't know what, but I can make you that good. So I would make it so that you would be able to beat any of your friends casually, any of your casual friends who just know the game, you would be able to beat all of them down.

One day down. I should do, I should do that. We should do an experiment. One day you teach me and I see if I can just beat all.

My friends who have never been trained.

I could totally do that.

That'd be amazing. And, and I could, you could pick, you know, games, since I was a kid, games are like my thing. You, you got, I'll let you pick the game.

It could be Scrabble, checkers, chess.

We should play checkers. I used to be good at checkers when I was a kid. We should play checkers and see who's checkers. I can make you in the top, you know, that's a little, the techniques are not as hard, but, scrabble is one where I can easily put you in the top 10% of players in a day.

Horrible in Scrabble.

And Monopoly, it would take me five minutes to put you in the top 20% of players. Yeah.

I haven't played Monopoly since I was probably seven or eight, but like when.

You go home for Thanksgiving, they don't break out like Monopoly or Scrabble or whatever.

We play other games, but we play like apples to apples or something with like the kids or yeah, but we should play Monopoly too. Yeah.

Yeah, you can't believe I'll just tell you right now the one secret that will make you the one of the best. What's that? If you remember the board and stuff, do you remember what properties or what color the properties were that are the most valuable? I mean, not remember, but do you know which ones?

Is it blue?

A lot, everybody says blue, which is Broadway and Park Place.

Park Place, yeah.

Blue is not the answer. The answer are the orange properties, which is St. James Place, New York Avenue, and I believe Tennessee Avenue.

Why is that?

So the most popular square to land on in Monopoly is jail because you can land on jail through the dice. There's also a go to jail square and there's two community chest cards that say go to jail immediately. So that's the most popular square by far that people land on. With two dice, the most popular roll is a seven. The seven puts you right in the middle of the orange properties. So if you own the orange properties and have hotels on them, Everyone's gonna owe you rent all game long. So that all you need to know is that and then own the utilities.

Get the orange properties.

Get the orange properties and get the.

In the beginning of the game, get the utilities. I like it.

I'm already I'm already better. I'm already better and in Scrabble just know all the legal two letter words.

Nobody knows them. Ooh. So if you know like 52 letter words, you win.

Yeah, or there's about a hundred. There's a little more than a hundred, but like XI, XU, QI, KA, ZA, these are all weird two letter words.

And if you know them, you can always have a hand. It's like solid.

Yeah, because it's hard to get rid of an X or a Q. But if you know that XU and XI are words, and then you throw them down on a triple letter word, boom, you win.

This is smart. So, yes, your learning practice is to skip the line in every game or area of life.

Yeah, and that's why I say, there's a hard way.

So I don't need. I don't need to be, like, a vocabulary Master. I just need to learn one strategy.

Yeah.

Could help me win a lot of the times. Obviously, if I'm going against a vocabulary Master, who also knows those, I'm not gonna win.

But. But he's in the top 100 in the world. You want to be just in the top one percent so you can beat everybody you know.

Everyone I know.

Yeah. Like, you don't know anybody who's in the top 100 in the world. They're, they're. kind of just studying Scrabble all day in their basement because they're living with their grandparents still. But here's the thing is that Scrabble also has lots of micro skills. For instance, you get 50 extra points every time you have a seven letter word. So there are some people who obsess on remembering all the seven letter words and there are techniques for doing that. But you don't have to do that if you know all the two letter words, you're gonna just beat all your friends anyway. Smart.

That's all you need to know. It's two letter words.

I like that. You focus on the right micro skills because again, it's a meta skill. You focus on the right micro skills that are important for you and that are easier for you. And that's how you get in the top 1% of the world. I could guarantee I'm in the top 1% of the world in Scrabble, but I'm not going to play at the highest level in a tournament, but nor.

Do I need to. But anyone who comes over for a dinner party, you could be.

I've got the Scrabble board front and center and I just say, oh yeah, I play. And if they want to have a casual game, destruction is in their future.

I like that. You have to give me, we'll have to do a full day sometime where you give me chess lesson for two hours, Scrabble, Monopoly, and we just, I just master all the games for the rest of my life.

Poker, poker's a good one too. Poker's a great one.

I'm a big fan of this. I'm so glad that you put together this book and packaged it in a unique way with a lot of the different experiments that you've tried. I want to make sure people get the book. Skip the line. The 10,000 Experiments Rule and other surprising advice for reaching your goals. So make sure you guys pick up a copy. Skip the line by my friend James Altucher. And, James, we've had you on a few times on this show and you've shared your three truths and definition of greatness before. So we'll link up the previous episodes if people want to watch that. and hear that. But what is the, to close this up, did you ever have a conversation with Jerry Seinfeld? No.

And somebody, E! Entertainment News, so I was on all the media and E! Entertainment News asked me, what would you say to Jerry Seinfeld if he was here right now? And I said, I would just turn around and walk away. And they said, why would you do that? Wouldn't you be curious? And I said, well, forget that his name is Jerry Seinfeld. If some random person wrote an entire, he filled an entire page in the New York Times just insulting me. If someone did that to you, a random person, and then they like showed up at your door, you'd slam the door in their face. Like you wouldn't want to talk to them. If someone in my living room, I'm not going to invite them back just because I'm curious, why'd you do that? They're out of my house forever.

So if he came to you and said, Hey, I just want to have a conversation, would you have a conversation with him? Would you talk to him?

No interest.

No interest. Do you still respect him as a comedian?

Yes. I think he's, I got, after his article came out, his book came out, Is this Anything? Two weeks after his article, and I really thought it's one of the best books ever about the process of comedy. Like it was a really great book. I highly recommend it.

So you still respect his craft, but you just don't appreciate the way he reacted.

Yeah, you might not like that Einstein wasn't the best husband, but he still created a theory of relativity.

There you go. Well, James, I appreciate him always a fan of your writing, and I'm glad you're getting back into it now. I know it was challenging for that period of time with a lot of criticism, but I acknowledge you for your courage to keep showing up, to keep writing, and also to take a break. when you need to. And, yeah, that was really important. And not feel like you need to like push through and write more and have more criticism. I think the fact that you went back into your passions and hobbies, your creative side and other creative endeavors like chess will support you becoming a better writer moving forward. So I acknowledge you for that. And, I'm excited for you to get the book. And, thanks so much for coming on my man. Appreciate it.

Yeah, Louis, thank you so much for inviting me. We've been friends for seven years and it's always such a pleasure. Hanging out and always our conversations are interesting. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure to share it with a friend or a few people that you think would be inspired by this as well. Just copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this or use the link lewishouse.com/1104 and send it to a few friends. Post it on social media. Tag me and James as well to let us know that you are listening to it. I'd love to connect with you over on social media. And if this is your first time here, welcome. Please subscribe over on Apple Podcasts right now. Just click on the subscribe button right now so you can stay notified and up to date from the latest and greatest from the School of Greatness, from the biggest names in the world, the greatest researchers and minds to help you unlock your greatness. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and a rating over on Apple Podcasts and let us know what you enjoyed most about this episode. episode. We also feature some of our top reviews every week in our Greatness Newsletter. So if you want to be featured with your review, make sure to post it over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want inspiring text messages sent to your phone every single week from me, then text the word podcast to 614-350-3960 to get on our special texting community list. And I want to leave you with this quote from author Peter Block. Roch who said, why do anything unless it is going to be great? We are all on a journey here and we're all imperfect human beings making mistakes every single day. But it's our opportunity every single day to learn from those mistakes, to figure out which habits will support us in improving the quality of our life, getting us closer to our ideal life, our goals, our dreams, and feeling the Fulfillment we want to feel inside. You've got an opportunity. every day to do something a little bit differently or just stay consistent on the things you know that are already helping you. Sometimes we know it's working, we just get off track and we need to get back on track. And if no one's told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter so much, I'm so grateful for you. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.

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