BookThinkers: Life-Changing Books Podcast with James Altucher

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to episode number 24 of our brand new podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, I interview one of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and live a better life. In this episode, I have the ultimate pleasure of interviewing the author James Altucher. So here's James's background. He's an American hedge fund manager, an author, a podcaster, and an entrepreneur who has co-founded or co-founded over 20 companies. He has published 20 books, and he's a contributor to publications including the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and the Huffington Post. And so our conversation today is all about Choose Yourself, a book that James published in 2013. And the subtitle is Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream. And that is what James is all about. We also explore some tips for writers, bloggers, and content creators that I found very useful. And so without further ado, please enjoy this amazing conversation with James Altucher. Well, Mr. James Altucher, thank you so much for joining the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast today. How are you doing?

I'm great. Nick, I'm doing great. And thank you so much for thinking of me to come on the podcast. I'm really, I'm really honored. You've had a lot of great guests on, a lot of good books. So I, I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited. As we were just talking about, we connected through Kamal Ravikant, who is a past guest on this show. And I loved— I've only read one of his books, but I absolutely loved it. And for those of the book thinkers—

He's a good guy and his books are great.

Yeah, and I enjoyed a conversation that you posted in January with him, which we'll get into in a few minutes. But for those in the Book Thinkers family that don't know who you are, can you introduce yourself to everybody?

Yeah, I, um, uh, I'm James Altucher, and I, I guess I'm an entrepreneur. I've started a bunch of businesses. Most of them have failed, but some of them have done okay. And I'm also a writer. I've written over 20 books. Most of those have failed, but some have done okay. I've done a lot of podcasting in the past 6 years and a lot of interviewing over my career, and my podcast, The James Altucher Show, has had a lot of really fun guests that I've learned from. And I've been a hedge fund manager, I've been in the finance space, I've been kind of in the self-help space, but I don't consider that really. And I've— I'm also a stand-up comedian. So I've toured around the world doing comedy. So I've done a lot of different things.

That is a beautifully diverse resume.

Yeah, that's the thing. Like, you want to have— you want to make things interesting. You want to have stories to tell. And so I'm never— I don't think I'm ever going to be the best in the world at something. But I like just pursuing passions and getting to that point where I love the nuances of the passion.

There's a lot to unpack there. And before we jump into some of those different subjects that you just mentioned, so that everybody's on the same base here, I just finished Choose Yourself, which is a book that was published in 2013 by you, and I really enjoyed it. And I'd love to have our conversation start off with a story. So in the book, you said that you actually saved the US stock market in 2009. And I'd love to have you tell that story to everybody because it was my first experience diving pretty deep into your writing style. And I found this was a beautiful example of how you do use humor in your writing.

Yeah. And all right, so I'll tell the story and then I love to talk about writing styles and stuff, but it was 2009. And as you remember, there was a financial crisis that started in 2008. It was really horrible. Like, the market fell apart, all the banks fell apart, there was potential bankruptcies everywhere. And I lived across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. Like, I would look out my window and see the New York Stock Exchange, and I could see all the traders going in every day. And at the time too, I was a little more into finance, so I used to go on CNBC once a week, and I would do it at the studio at the the New York Stock Exchange. So I'd literally roll out of bed, walk over to the New York Stock Exchange, go on CNBC, and then go back to sleep. Because I was also unemployed. But early 2009, in March 2009, the market was still falling apart. And I didn't think— I won't get into all the financial stuff, but everything I was seeing was suggesting that this is irrational. The market should not be falling apart, but it kept going lower and lower, even lower than it had gone in 2008. And I would just watch these traders walking into the New York Stock Exchange. They looked so depressed all the time. I'm like, how can all these depressed people bring the world economy up? They're not going to go in there and start jumping for joy and buying stocks. They're all morose walking in. So I went out and I bought— I went to a drugstore. I bought a couple of bags of chocolates. like kind of like Halloween candy, like little Hershey's Kisses and stuff. And then just for every trader walking into the stock exchange, I would give them a Hershey Kiss. And they would sort of stop, they were always looking at the ground, and they would sort of stop, look up at me, and they would smile, and they would take the Hershey Kiss. Now, the critical thing about chocolate is that it triggers oxytocin, which is this neurochemical that leads to You know, it's called the love chemical sometimes, and it leads to more confidence and more risk-taking. And so that day was March 9th. It was the bottom of the stock market. It's the lowest it's been since. And the market just took off that day and just kept going. It never really stopped. I mean, it did stop in February of— or yeah, in March. of course, and, you know, had a horrible crash, but, you know, from 2009 to 2010, it was almost a straight-up move. And so, yeah, I think me handing out chocolates to 100 traders got everybody a little bit more speculative, and, you know, it's not bragging if it's true, which—

It's not bragging if it's true.

That's my motto.

I love that, and you just mentioned writing style. In the beginning of Tools— well, not in the beginning, but in your Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss chapter, there's an opening quote that he really makes it big and bold, and it's actually about your writing style. So I'd like to read this to everybody and then we can have a conversation about it.

Sure.

The quote reads, we all have, let's say, 2 or 3 dozen massive pain points in our lives that everyone can relate to. I try to basically write about those, and then I try to write about how I attempted to recover from them. And so being vulnerable and being authentic in your writing is absolutely a big piece of what you're doing, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's really important to say something new every time you write, say something that people haven't already explored before. Like, you know, if I was to talk about, I don't know, You know, right now everybody's writing political stuff. If I was to say, you know, Joe Biden is bad, or Donald Trump is bad, and write an article, and I just repeat all the same things that everyone else repeats, that would be the worst writing ever. It's like a topic that a billion people have written on, and I wouldn't add anything new. And, you know, and also, even if I just say, oh, well, here's some— here's my reason why I don't like one of the candidates. No one cares. Like, who cares about my reason? You know, if I just— if I'm just giving an opinion. So really, you have to— you have to explore something new in life that everyone can relate to. But the, the only evidence, the best evidence I have is my own life and how I dealt with something. And now I have to make sure I'm not being biased. Like, let's say I had a bad experience I don't know, let's say I had a bad experience going to college, and so I use that bad experience to say, this is why college is bad. Then I have to really check myself and make sure, am I smoking crack here? Am I biased? Or can I come full circle? Can I tell stories? Can I interweave it with facts and build an argument that's so strong I would not be able to argue against myself. Like, I have to think of the other side's argument too and try to really argue against myself in order to steel-proof what I'm saying. So, so a kind of a rule of thumb I have here is I don't hit publish on something unless I'm afraid of what people will think of me. So for instance, in Choose Yourself, I can say that about every single chapter. Like, I won't hit publish I won't put this chapter in the book unless I'm afraid of what people will think of me after they read this chapter. Because then if that fear tells me that this is new, it's something new about me that I'm revealing, it's something new about an opinion I'm sharing or a way of life. And you know, a lot of these things, like I don't write self-help, but I write about all these painful experiences I've had and how I've bounced back. So as opposed to saying, here's 10 ways to be smarter, which is an article you could read anywhere. If I say, this is what I did to learn when I really needed to learn really fast or I was gonna get fired or I was gonna go broke or whatever, then I could just say to people, look, you don't have to listen to me. This is just my experience. That's it. And I did these things and I explained them pretty clearly and here's what was happening to me when it started and here's the outcome. And the other thing is I try not to give an opinion or a judgment. So I don't say— I try not to say, this experience was horrible. It should be pretty clear when I describe the experience that it was horrible. If they can't figure it out without me telling them, oh, and by the way, this was horrible, then I wrote it wrong. Like, if I have to say, I was hit by a car, and by the way, it was horrible, that would be bad writing also. So I like to be— almost minimalist. Like, I was hit by a car, they took me to the hospital, they had to remove my face and replace it with a new face, and on and on. And then it would be clear that, oh, this is a strange experience, it sounds really horrible, and I want to read further because he's sort of leading me along very quickly through the experience.

That's really interesting. A lot of— to differentiate yourself, you can look at the fact that a lot of writing today It focuses on duality. It tries to take a very specific stance that is either going to make you love them or make you hate them. Whereas what you're doing is documenting your experience in a funny, creative way. You're documenting— yeah.

Sorry. Well, well, well, you— it was an interesting point about making people love you or making people hate you. I think most of the time I'm sort of trying to make people hate me. Not trying, But like, if you're gonna talk about the worst experiences of your life, taking responsibility for things that happen to you sometimes puts you in a bad light.

Mm-hmm.

So if you're being honest and vulnerable and sharing an experience that's real, more often you're gonna put yourself in a bad light than a good light. Like, it's not a very interesting story to say, this is what happened to me the last time I contributed to charity. Like, that's not an interesting story. But it might be more interesting, you know, this is the last time I shoplifted from, you know, the store, and now I feel really bad about it and I don't know what to do, or something like that, something that's real. And, you know, hopefully people respect that you're being honest and you're being authentic, and they see how you Struggled with what was happening to you and they see how you came back from it and whether they like you or not, they at least like the writing and they admire the story and they enjoy the story and they admire what you did. So then I don't have to care if people like me if A, I told an authentic story, B, it was also entertaining, and C, they went on a journey with me that maybe we all improve from or we all learn something. And that's usually the best writing. And again, it's something new. It's always gotta be something new.

Entertaining authenticity is almost a stepchild of controversy. And controversy, I think, actually, we were just talking about The 48 Laws of Power. That's one of the laws is to create controversy because it helps accelerate word of mouth. It is almost skipping the line. You get people to talk about you. And one example from Choose Yourself, I was, quietly reading the book, having fun going through. And I read the section where you talked about applying to a homeless shelter to meet girls.

Oh yeah.

And my girlfriend was just coming over at the time and I flipped back a couple of pages because I had circled and I said, let me read you this page and a half because I think it is hilariously authentic, authentically entertaining, whatever you want to call it. And that is a very interesting writing style because in personal development or nonfiction, whatever you want to call my genre. I don't see a lot of that. I definitely don't see a lot of that.

No, because I think, I think people are afraid, like when you're writing a personal development book, you're like an expert on something. Like if you're writing a book on weight loss, you're supposed to be an expert on not only recipes, which was like very '70s style of weight loss book, but you have to be an expert on the biology and other methods of weight loss and the science of weight loss and so on. And for you to say, hey, I don't really know what I'm talking about, that's kind of off-putting to someone who just bought your book. But I kind of make it a point to make sure people realize I don't know anything more than anybody else. We're all kind of— you realize it with this pandemic, everybody suddenly was an epidemiologist on Twitter. The entire planet was like, a closet epidemiologist, it turned out. And most of us don't really know anything, even the doctors. There was all these doctors commenting and they were respected because they had an MD, but most of them knew nothing about what was going on. They didn't know any more than you or I did. So in general, most of us don't know anything about anything. We're all exploring, we're all figuring it out at the same time. And so the best you could do really is be is tell your story and be honest. And at the time, like, I started using this style of writing more and more around 2010, and this is after 20 years of writing. The first 10 years of writing, I wrote like 5 books but wasn't able to publish any of them. My first book was in 2004. I started writing in 1990 every single day. My first book published was in 2004, and then around 2010, I was like, just screw it. I can't— I'm sick of everything. I can't do this anymore. And I started really writing from a point of I just don't care at all. And I'm just going to say that, you know, I've been writing for so long and I've been reading so many things that have influenced my writing. I want to be like the writers I admire, and the writers I most admire are the most authentic, honest, vulnerable ones who aren't afraid of exposing themselves And exposing their pains and their vulnerabilities and the things that they've done poorly. And I think people appreciated that. So I kind of, not that I on purpose keep that style, but a lot of my writing still falls into that category. And then in terms of controversy, it's, I think it's poor style to be controversial just to be controversial. I think what happens is You know, you get a feeling like you read something and you get annoyed, and then you combine your annoyance with your writing skill, and out comes, you know, an article that is more likely to be controversial than if someone doesn't have both of those 2 things I mentioned. Like, if someone doesn't have the writing skill, or if someone doesn't really have an annoyed feeling of something, Then when you put it together, something not that great will come out. But if you have the— if you have, you know, and for people who are great on video, if you're great on video and know how to produce a good little TikTok or YouTube or show or whatever, and you have something that annoys you and you put those together, you'll have a great product. Like Jon Stewart every night with The Daily Show was able to put together a great product. And so for me, writing combined with a strong opinion that's really annoying me. That's kind of important too. It's really annoying me. When I put those together, it tends to— that tends to be the greatest source of like a viral article, for instance.

It's really interesting to hear you talk about the process like that. Is there anything else that you'd like to share for aspiring writers out there, or people who maybe have documented experiences that they want to talk about, but they're too scared to put it out there? Yeah.

I mean, I could, we could do the whole podcast about writing. I just love, I mean, I've been writing every day for, for 30 years and, and it really just started off again, similar to that chapter. It started off because I was in college and I liked this girl who had a crush on this guy, or they were dating actually. He was my roommate and he was like this writer. Writer wannabe. He's never written anything in his life, but he had that writer look. Like, I don't know how to describe it, but he would like read, carry around James Joyce's Ulysses or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow.

Similar to an artist, like a painter or something.

Yeah, yeah, that artist feel. And he would always say things knowingly. And if you didn't understand what he was talking about, which was usual, he would just laugh, you know, laugh to himself. And I, by the way, I like him, Mark. I love you. Even if you're listening to this, you know what I think about you anyway. And, but I, I really thought, oh, she's attracted to him because of this whole writerly thing. So I wanted to be a good writer instead of a wannabe writer. And so I just started writing every day and I didn't have any education or experience in it. I was a computer science major. And so I had never really read anything other than science fiction books when I was a kid. So I just started every day reading and writing, and both those activities are so important for the writing skill. Now you don't need writing skill to write a bestselling book. You could write a bestselling book in many, many ways. If the topic's really interesting, if you know a lot about the topic, if you're really good at coming up with a good plot, for instance, you could write a great novel even if it's not Well written. But for me, I just, I really loved, I fell in love with the art. I used to read all day and then I would read the criticism. I'd go to the library and there's something called the Encyclopedia of Literary Criticism. I don't even know if it still exists. And there would be all these articles, you know, of literary criticism of whatever books I had just read. So I'd read those. I would, sometimes I'd write out really great short stories, just write them out. so I could just word by word think of, try to think of what the writer was thinking. And I mean, there's a real big difference between the best writers ever and mediocre writing. And so I view most, like, let's say self-help or business self-help or most nonfiction, I view as, you know, not bad writing, but not good writing. And then, you know, fiction writers usually are the best writers because they, Somebody who writes a nonfiction book about the stock market, they're really good at the stock market. So I'm going to trust what they say about the stock market, but they might not have the best skills at writing. But fiction, what do they spend their lives getting good at is writing. That's what a fiction person does. So when I'm trying to write even nonfiction, I'm thinking with a fictional point of view.

Mm-hmm.

Not that I never have written anything in my books that are fictional, it's all true, but the style is almost like a narrative nonfiction storytelling style. So that's why these chapters in these books feel more like a story, like I'm writing a short story rather than, oh, this is 10 ways to get smarter or whatever. And then, so in terms of advice, I would encourage people to read a lot and read your favorite writers and think about what they're doing. I also like autobiographical nonfiction. So a classic example, but not the only one, is like Charles Bukowski, most of his books, but starting with Post Office. And in terms of writing, sometimes you have something you want to say, but you don't know how to begin it. A lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about the beginning and thinking about the ending. And what I tell people to do is just start in the middle.

Yeah.

So like, if I really do want to write 10 things that I've done to make myself smarter, I'll just start off by writing the list and just no story, just writing the list. And then I'll start to flesh out like, what's the story where I use this technique? What's the story where I use this other technique? It's all gotta be story-based. And then I'll start to think of, you know, the story to open this up. Like, why, why do I need to write this? Why is this topic important to me? And then, and then, and then that, that, you know, I'll usually create a couple paragraphs in the beginning, a couple paragraphs at the end. And then this is sort of a weird technique, but even knowing this technique that I'm about to say, even knowing it in advance, you'll still want to use it. And the technique is, When you're done, just cut out the first paragraph and the last paragraph, and you'll see that the story actually reads better. Oh, let me turn this up. The story actually reads better knowing that— oh, this is Kamal Ravikant calling.

You can put him on speaker. Tell him I said hi.

I just hung up, but I'll tell him that anyway in a bit. But yeah, if you— after you write your chapter, This is why it's so useless to spend too much time thinking about the beginning and the end. Take out the first paragraph, take out the last paragraph, and 9 times out of 10, your article will read better. It'll have a better beginning and a better end, which usually shocks people. Like, well, what if I already know that technique? I'll write planning that. Nope, doesn't matter. It still works.

I really love that idea.

In fact, let me just— I'm sorry to interrupt you. Interrupt, I apologize. But, uh, yeah, I just— I'm working on an article right now. And I just took out the first paragraph, you know, in my head. And the new beginning is like 10 times better than how I started it.

Did you learn that from somebody else? Did that come from somebody else's writing style or practice?

No, but I learned that by editing. You know, you always want to start off in a way that almost feels like a painting where there's things going on outside the painting. So people are drawn in. What's happening here? It looks like I'm only seeing a slice of something in a much bigger world. So they get much more curious. So for instance, I was just, you know, do you mind if I tell the example I was just working on right now?

No, I don't mind at all.

So it's a more, a little bit more topical, current event-ish type of thing, but this is one of the things that annoy me in the current environment is that there's a lot of important things happening, whether it's about the economic lockdown, whether it's about politics, whether it's about this virus, and most people do not understand what's really happening. And not because they're stupid, it's because they're just— They're not paying attention. the media feeds a message and everyone just sort of buys into that message, like, oh, the New York Times said it, so it must be true, or whatever. And so a lot of things are being debated right now about evictions. Like in New York City, 1 in 4 people have not paid rent since March because there's an eviction moratorium. So what— And now they're extending it till December 31st, possibly. And people are saying, well, screw the landlords, or screw the banks, or who cares, or whatever. So without really stating an opinion, I wanted to explain exactly in layman's terms, what does this all mean? What's the good, the bad, and the ugly? And what are the unusual things that probably people do not expect out of this? Who is unnecessarily hurt? Who unnecessarily benefits? And so on. So I started this article like one would. I, the first sentence was, what happens in an eviction moratorium? Which, all right, that explains, that's what we learned in high school. Explain in the first paragraph or sentence, what is this article about? Who, what, why, when, where? So, you know, what happens in an eviction moratorium? So I'm gonna, I'm hitting delete right now. I'm taking that mini paragraph out, that one line. And the next paragraph is, I stopped paying my mortgage in June 2002. I just couldn't afford it anymore. I was broke. I like it a lot.

Yeah, you're cutting right into the middle of the story. It's almost like starting with, you know, Nick just got punched in the face, not the story leading up to Nick getting punched in the face. So—

Yeah, right. Or, or, or, you know, Nick was— Nick had 2 black eyes and was bleeding from his nose when he got up off the ground. Well, how did he even get to the ground? What happened? Who just hurt him? Or did he get hurt? Or did he punch himself? Like, you want to know, why did I stop paying my mortgage? Why was I broke? What did I do to survive? Did I go bankrupt? And then that's a much more storytelling way of getting into the whole eviction moratorium thing.

Yeah, that's fascinating. The fictional narrative.

And by the way, I know Again, I know this rule that I always apply. I obviously didn't apply it in this until just this moment, and it worked.

Yeah, no, that's great. Well, I'll ask another question or two about writing because I am, you know, I said there are aspiring writers in the audience, but I'm an aspiring writer as well. And something that—

As everybody should be, because writing is a powerful tool.

I journaled for a very long time, 3 things that I was grateful for every day. And sometimes it would be a couple sentences, sometimes it would be a couple paragraphs. But now that I've been in this personal development world for a few years and running Book Thinkers, I aspire to write some of my own work in the future. And in your book, you talk about how to become an idea machine. It takes 6 to 12 months, but how to become an idea machine by writing down 10 things per day. So I'd love to have you share that with everybody as well, because that's been part of your routine for a very long time, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah. Absolutely. So this was a period where I was going dead broke. I was broke. I was losing my home. I actually just referred to it in this eviction story. I did stop paying my mortgage in the summer of 2002 because I was going broke and I had no opportunities and no jobs and I was really depressed. And I was taking a walk and I wandered into this restaurant supplies store and they had a box of waiter's pads for $10, 100 waiter's pads for $10. And I'm like, oh, I really like the look of these. Like it's sort of this soft blue and fits in your pocket and it's not fancy and you can't really like write— I won't be tempted to like write a whole story or write a novel on this. It's just bullet points. So I'll just take it around with me. And I took it into a— I bought all these waiter's pads. The next morning I go to a local cafe and I have this idea for a book. So I write down the 10 chapters of the book. The next day I write down 10 subchapters of each chapter. And I'm like, oh, I've been depressed for a year now and I was feeling excited about this book. And even though I'm about to go broke, I'm losing everything, I'm losing You know, I have 2 kids. I didn't know what I was going to do. And I kept writing ideas down for things I could do, different books I could write, maybe businesses I could start. I was into investing, so different investing strategies I could try or test, different people I wanted to have coffee with or email with. And so then I sent out emails to everybody I wanted to have coffee with. I was like, hey, I'm a big fan. I'll buy a cup of coffee with you. Just, can I have 10 minutes to pick your brain? I'll buy a coffee. Nobody responded to me. Zero. Because who, like, why would they respond? Warren Buffett's not gonna say, oh my gosh, I can't believe someone named James Altucher is willing to buy me a 60-cent cup of coffee. I better, like, not plan anything else that day and just meet him. Like, they're never gonna do that. So I started to think, okay, well, let's write 10 ideas for each one of these people. And I would study their business and I would write 10 ideas about, hey, you know, big fan, you know, no pre— you don't need to get back to me. Here's 10 ideas for your business. Good luck. Boom. And I did that. And like one guy, I wrote, here's 10 ideas for articles. you should write. And he was a big writer in the finance space and I sent it to him. And out of the 20 people, you know, 3 people wrote back including that writer. That writer said, hey, these ideas are great. How about you write them and we'll hire you? So this was the first time I got paid for writing as I started writing these finance articles. And then with another guy I said, hey, I know your style. I even read your PhD thesis which explains your style. And Here's 10 investment strategies that I programmed up with software that I could show you and you could have them for free. You don't have to get back to me. Good luck. I'm happy to even train your employees. And he ended up investing money with me. So suddenly I was a professional writer and a professional investor. And so I started off 2 careers just from writing down ideas and sharing ideas. That's really important too. Because of sharing ideas, I've been to, I visited Google, Facebook, Amazon, Quora, LinkedIn, Airbnb, tons of companies because I'll always write, 10 ideas how Airbnb can improve the user experience. 10 ideas how Amazon could do better at self-publishing. Amazon would write back or someone there would write back and say, hey, this sounds really great. Let us know if you're ever in Seattle. And I would always write back and I would say, what a coincidence, I'm going to be in Seattle next week. Do you have any time? And I wasn't going to be in Seattle. I'd never been in Seattle in my life, but I booked the ticket right then when they would reply and say, yeah, that sounds great. Come in on Wednesday. And, you know, I'd always go out and then I would suddenly—

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I would see everything Amazon's working on and I would build these connections so that when I published the book, I had someone to call if there was a problem. And, you know, or Google, uh, every company, I, I, those connections have lasted the entire time. since and have been very incredibly useful for me. But, you know, but every day— and what happens is after a few months, even after a few weeks really of doing this, I went from being totally depressed and taking antidepressants and going to therapy and none of it was useful and going broke. And I was still broke, but suddenly I was excited. I was, I don't know, it was like my heart was talking to my brain for the first time in forever and I felt like literally my neurons connecting in new ways that being creative and just, it's like a muscle, the idea muscle, and it will atrophy if you don't use it. But just writing down 10 ideas a day, I realized I had this whole extra functionality in my brain that was also making me not only more creative but happier and I've been doing it ever since and it's really incredible. So like for instance, today, so I use the site predictit.org. It allows you to bet on political outcomes. So for instance, you could, a very simple bet, you could bet on who's going to win, Biden or Trump. And it's on this website, predictit.org. And there's a lot of philosophical theories. Are prediction markets better than polls or more accurate than polls and so on? So I play around a lot with these, but I wrote to the CEO, who I don't really know, and I pitched, here's 10 ideas for new markets that people could bet on. So for instance, will inflation be greater than 2% by the end of the year? Or what day will the presidential election be decided? Because it's pretty clear now it's not going to be decided November 3rd. Will it be November 4th? Will it be January 1st? We don't know. It's kind of It's an interesting thing to bet on. So I just had a bunch of ideas for markets. And I'll just add one more thing, which is that most ideas I write are bad ideas because just by definition, a good idea— people say ideas are a dime a dozen. It's not really true. Good ideas are pretty rare. And so it's really just practice. I don't write 10 good ideas a day. I practice writing 10 good ideas a day. The thing about execution, people say ideas are worthless, execution is everything. Execution is just a subset of ideas. Execution ideas are— I know people who execute very poorly because they have bad ideas about execution. Let's say you have an idea for a software product and you think to yourself, oh, I don't know how to do software. I better raise $5 million first. Well, you just made your idea impossible. There's lots of ways to execute better on very, very hard ideas. There's always like a way to execute better on an idea. And that's, again, execution is just— good execution is being good at ideas.

The idea for Book Thinkers actually started because towards the end of my college experience, I had read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And he talks about a mastermind group. If you can meet up with people who are like-minded, 2 minds together can actually equal 3 instead of 2 because it creates this third mind.

Absolutely.

And so my partner and I at the time, we would meet up every week and throughout the week we would write down things that were bothering us. You know, I really didn't enjoy doing my laundry this week, or I really didn't enjoy having to summarize my book takeaways manually 10 times in a row and share them with people. And then Book Thinkers was born, you know, and here we are many, many iterations later. And now I'm talking to you, you know, one of the coolest writers out there. And so there's this adjacent possible that happens after writing down ideas. that you can never predict the first time you write the idea down, which is really interesting too.

Absolutely. That is such an important concept. I mentioned it in Choose Yourself. It's called idea sex. And actually in my next book, Skip the Line, I flesh it out even more. I think I call that chapter The Secrets of Idea Math because I talk about idea multiplication, idea addition, idea subtraction, you know, idea Exponentials. And the concept of combining 2 ideas is so valuable. If you look through every invention in history even, they basically combine 2 ideas. I'll give you an example. Facebook wasn't the first social network, right? But I mean, there was MySpace, there was Friendster, there was GeoCities, there was Tribes.com. So Facebook was like the— 5th, 6th, 7th social network out there. But it combined 2 ideas. It combined the idea of social network with the idea of confirmed identity. No social— like MySpace, everybody was anonymous. So Facebook was the first real social network where you had to verify your identity, at least in the beginning. I don't know if you still do. And social networks. And that combination created the most powerful social network because it turned out— We didn't want to just socialize, we also wanted to stay in touch with our friends from kindergarten or school or our older jobs or whatever. So we needed to know that so-and-so was there and who they said they were. So Google was the 8th search engine or the 10th search engine, but it was a search engine combined with the way, the exact algorithm how academics rank the importance of academic papers, which is how many papers refer to this academic paper. That if 100 scientists refer to your paper, then your paper's more important than if only one scientist does. And so that's how the original Google algorithm was. So that was a, an old algorithm used in academia. And, and it was, search engines were, you know, all over the place, but Google was the first to combine these 2 concepts, idea sex, and boom, Rest is history.

I love that.

And then let's combine Google with China. So Robin Li took the exact same algorithm and brought it to China, Baidu. So that's how Baidu started.

I love idea sex, and I love that in your new book you're gonna have a whole chapter on it. It's, normally in my podcasts, I don't take outside ad money or anything like that, which we'll get into about your blog in a minute, but I do add little ads sometimes about the Book Thinkers mobile application, which is a new app. And what it does, and this is related to Idea Sex, it's a place for you to record all of your biggest takeaways from the books you're reading.

Oh, that's a great idea.

And then it systematically reminds you of those notes using spaced repetition. But here's where it gets super cool, and this is an adjacent kind of possible functionality that we didn't really intend on. You might have just read Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It, and you might have just heard Kamal talk about you know, staring into the mirror and saying, I love yourself as you breathe in and thank you, God, on your way out. Right. And that's a positive affirmation, but, and you just put it in the system. So we're going to give it to you a couple of times in the next couple of weeks, but you read The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod 3 years ago. And now, you know, you're going to get hit at the same time, the same reminder, The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and the importance of affirmations and how he structures them. And all of a sudden, maybe you're out of practice with your affirmations and you can apply both techniques together to make something better. And that's what's happening now when people are adding a bunch of books in there. So it's totally idea sex. I love it.

Here's something I was just thinking right now. You know, have you seen this GPT-3 OpenAI project? So it's amazing. Like, you feed in— let's say you feed in a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories. It will then write a legit Sherlock Holmes story. Like, it's the most powerful deep learning AI out there. I think if you go to openai.org, you might be able to see ways to interface with it. But imagine this. And there's other examples, like if you feed in all Mozart's compositions, it'll figure out the structure and write a Mozart composition that'll be pretty good. Sometimes you can't tell if this is Mozart or not. And I've read entire articles where I thought it was the author who I knew, was writing the article and it turned out he was just experimenting with this GPT-3.

Wow.

So imagine if you take all the observations, let's say you read 1,000 books and you have 10 observations. So now you have 10,000 observations from 1,000 books. You feed them all into this, right? And then now you have a book that you haven't read yet, but you want to read it super fast. The AI now knows the kind of words, sentences, ideas that you like, and it'll read the book in a second and spit out what are probably gonna be the most likely takeaways that you would take away from that book. So that, that could be interesting as well. Now here's, let's go one step further. Let's say you're on a date and you, and you, you turn on an online transcription service that's constantly feeding in as if it were a book, everything your date is saying. Okay, and then at the end, it spits out— it takes from every word she said, it spits out what it thinks your takeaways would be from her conversation. If you had no takeaways, maybe not the right girl for you. If you have 50 takeaways, maybe, oh, here's someone who thinks like you, has similar values, you're both thinking about personal development, and so on.

For people who need a kick of confidence at the end of a date too, it could probably predict based on conversation and everything like that. whether or not she would say yes to a second date.

Well, okay, so what you could do there is you could record every date you have and then you could— this is not deep learning, but this is— I forget what it's called. It's like coordinated learning. You could say, okay, you feed in every conversation of every date and a date is either a 1 or a 0. 1 if they agree to a second date, 0 if that's the end. Either because they reject you or you reject them or whatever. And so even throughout the date, the learning could start to tell you this is leaning, this is 70% chance, this is a 1, 80% chance. Now you say something wrong, oh no, it's went down to a 40% chance. So you veer back. And so that's certainly possible with today's technology and using your software combined with this GPT-3 idea.

Well, for everybody listening, that is the Perfect example of probably an internal dialogue around idea sex, and as well as just the 10 ideas that you want to write down every day, huh?

Yeah, because that's what it is. You also want to make it not easy for yourself. Like, you have to think of things that are difficult to think about so that you really sweat the— you know, like Mike Tyson says, he doesn't start counting the number of push-ups he's done until he's about— until he's already giving up. And then he starts 1, 2, 3. So, uh, because that's how you exercise the muscle. Otherwise it's just easy and you're not exercising anything.

It's probably fun to just go back and look at the bad ideas in the first place, because in, in your Tools of Titans chapter, Tim writes a little sub-comment where he says, I tried this out, I tried 10 radical things in my life that I could do, and eventually he ran out. So he just got rid of the— he got rid of the rules, sort of. He broke out of his cage, and then he even got to like, you know, chop both of my feet off. And he's like, wait a second, that is a terrible Terrible idea, you know, but it's fun to go back and look at. Now it even makes it into a book.

So yeah, well, people say to me, oh, I have a hard time coming up with 10 ideas, and the solution is, okay, come up with 20 ideas. Because again, it's okay if they're bad ideas. That's not the point. The point is really coming up with 10 ideas. And it's too— like, every time, this is every single time since 2002, Every time I hit idea number 7, I'm stuck. I can't think of 3 more and I'm counting, oh, did I get to 10 yet? Did I get to 10? And it takes another 10, 15 minutes to come up with the last 3 ideas. I might blitz right through the first 7 and then it takes a while to come up with the last 3. And this is how I write articles now. This is how I write books. Like, what are the 10 ideas to kind of kickstart this book? What are the 10 ideas I'm thinking of around this topic of Whatever the article's about. What are 10 things that happened to me that might be stories? What are 10 experiments I could do today that I could learn from? You know, like I'm wearing a pair of pajamas right now. I've been wearing a pair of pajamas for the past 3 or 4 months. I've been on planes in pajamas. I've performed stand-up comedy in pajamas. I've gone to fancy dinners in pajamas. Because I'm experimenting with this idea that, you know, after 6 months of lockdown and remote work, the kind of clothes we wear won't be dictated by the normal society idea of, you know, outside clothing. And pajamas are the most comfortable clothes by definition. You could sleep in them. And maybe there's— seeing how people react, maybe there's ideas I can do about combining designs normally for outdoor wear with, you know, the fabrics and stuff for, you know, sleepwear. So, but that's just an experiment and probably will never do anything with it. I just ended up liking wearing pajamas all the time now.

Well, you just, you just triggered a couple funny memories for me. There was a time where I had this amazing Christmas sweater. It was tacky, but it wasn't too tacky, like over the top with things hanging off of it. And I, I remember I I wore it to a bar one time in maybe October, and the number of people that went out of their way to tell me that it wasn't December yet was overwhelming. And I, you know, I'm just thinking how many funny interactions I had that one day just because of what you said. And I probably never would have thought about that for the rest of my life had you not brought that up.

Yeah.

And so many of these adjacent possibles.

It's, it's related to what we were talking about earlier about Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power, where he talks about one of the laws is the power of controversy, you know, to get people buzzing. And again, it's very important that you can't be controversial just to be controversial, because then that's really just— you won't have passion for it, it won't be interesting, people will see right through that. But it doesn't have to be some controversy like, oh, I think people should be allowed to kill each other. Like, even just wearing a tacky sweater to a bar is controversial enough, or bringing a waiter's pad to a business meeting, everyone's pulling out their fancy, you know, $300 Moleskine notebooks, and you pull out a waiter's pad, I guarantee you, you will be the center of attention immediately in that meeting. And whoever's running the meeting, the first thing they will say is, I'll take fries with that burger. They all make the same joke. And then you're able to say— and then they finally say, well, why do you have that? And you're able to say, well, I can write down the names of everybody around the table because there's little pictures of tables at the top of a waiter's pad. I can— it's easier to take notes because it's bullet point format. And I'm frugal. I bought each one of these for 10 cents. So, you know, I like to be frugal, which everybody likes to hear in a business meeting.

Yeah. And that is your true, authentic, entertaining self, which is great.

Yeah.

Related to this same subject, in your book on page 110 of Choose Yourself, you write, blogging is not about money, blogging is about trust. And then you go on to say that your blog has made a total of zero cents, but it's created millions in opportunities. And so I think there are a lot of content creators in my audience, given a lot of people come from social media, but they're trying to make money directly on the platform instead of looking for opportunities outside of the platform. look at my experience with you right now. I created an Instagram page and then here we are on a podcast talking about books that I love and I get to ask personal questions and there's no money being made on either one of these, but both of them together gave me an audience to put out an app as an example. And so, yeah, could you talk a little bit more about that for people who haven't heard about that concept before? Yeah.

Um, so, uh, Actually, in my next book, I talk— so the next book's called Skip the Line, coming out in February. I talk a little bit more about this. I call this the spoke and wheel approach. So the wheel is what your message is or what your idea is or what you're passionate about. So for instance, you're passionate about books. So one spoke is your Instagram page. One spoke is the podcast. Yeah. One spoke might be if you write, if you send around a free email list like, here's reviews of my favorite books, or, here's my book list for the week. And then one spoke is this app, the Book Thinkers app, so that might turn into a business that you could monetize. So you have lots of spokes and that builds out the full wheel. The core of the wheel is the fact that you love books. But then you have all these different spokes and you can make a for-pay newsletter. You could do something like what BookBub does, which is work out 5 special deals a week in books. And so people subscribe to get discounts in books and that builds a whole business of affiliate fees. And so like for me, I had the blog and that was almost blogging and writing were my— and being authentic about all my experiences, that was almost the core. And then I would have spokes. Like, I wrote a lot about my experience as an entrepreneur, so entrepreneurs would call me and I'd get opportunities to either invest or be an advisor or get shares or do consulting. I wrote about being a public speaker, and so suddenly I was getting speaking opportunities. And then I wrote Choose Yourself, so that was another spoke. I'll take my blog and take some of the ideas and make a book out of it. That led to enormous opportunities. Like someone read that and said, I'll fund your podcast. And so now I had a podcast. Then another person read it and said, oh, I want you to do a newsletter for me. We'll pay you X percent of the profits. And so I started doing that. And when you take this approach where you're not betting on any one thing in particular, you will win. That's a good skip the line technique to think of as many, you know, spokes as possible. And then you can focus on the ones that can monetize the fastest. So, uh, or, or you could focus on the ones that, you know, build audience. Like each thing has different goals.

Well, I know that we've got to wrap up because of time, but, uh, so I'd love to have you talk a little bit more about Skip the Line before we jump off. The book comes out, you said February next year?

Yeah, February 23rd. And the basic idea is that right now we're living in this point in history where 55 million people were furloughed or laid off from their jobs in the past 6 months at one point or other. And that's about 40% of all American workers. So, society itself, society around the world, everybody's looking around and saying, well, what should I do now? Well, I'm really interested. And then there's always the question, and Tim, Ferriss and I had this conversation once where, what would you do if you absolutely had no concerns about money? And most people wouldn't just lie on the beach. That's kind of boring. So maybe someone wants to be a professional athlete. Maybe someone wants to be an actor or a writer or an entrepreneur or an investor. And so, all right, do it. And then you could say, well, I can't be a professional You know, basketball player. I'm 4'6 and I don't know how to shoot a basket, but I really love it. Well, okay, let's start coming up with ideas. Like maybe you could write about fantasy basketball, or I don't even know, is there a fantasy basketball league? Maybe you could set one up, or maybe you could, um, um, you know, write a, a book, uh, you know, the top 101 best basketball players of all time and why. And then you could set up a Facebook community for everybody to argue about it. Or you could create an Uber of basketball coaches. So here's people who want to learn basketball, here's basketball coaches who want to sign up for it, and boom, whatever. So you start thinking of these spokes, and then there's usually some way to make money in there, and there's other ways to have fun. You could do a podcast about basketball. I mean, you could do— nothing is too niche. You can make an online course about basketball where you just interview 50 basketball coaches and each episode of your course or each video in your course is just another 20 examples of correct free throws. I don't even know anything about basketball. I don't know why I'm talking about basketball. I don't even know.

I love it.

Free throw is a thing in basketball, right?

Yes. Yeah.

So that's that I know about basketball. But, um, you know, that's just so, so skipping the line is this idea that if you try to do something, first off, there's the voices in your head that tell you you can't do it. Second off, if you say to your friends, hey, I think I'm going to be an actor, they're going to be like, are you crazy, James? You don't know how to act. You gotta go to Hollywood. You gotta go to acting school. Your friends are always going to tell you you can't because they like you who you are. They don't like— they don't want you to be—

Mm-hmm.

The bestselling author, greater sales than Harry Potter. They don't want you to be an actor in Hollywood. They, they like you right where you are, not too, too much better and not too much worse. And so everybody's going to tell you you can't when you're trying to walk to the destination and you have to skip them. You have to skip the line. And I give all these different techniques and stories of others who have done it. How I've done it, because I've had like 5 or 6 different careers. And not that, again, not that I've been the best in the world at anything, but I've always been able to monetize and monetize sometimes very well. And I've also gotten broke. So I had, I was forced to, a gun to my head, I had to reinvent myself over and over again. So I basically just write these stories and kind of pull out the techniques that I used You know, like this spoken wheel idea or idea sex and how I've used it and so on.

Well, I can't wait to read it and we'll have to have another conversation. That sounds like it's right up my alley. And I know that the Book Thinkers family will adopt that and bring it in too, because a lot of people ask me questions related to that subject. For people who want to learn more about you, where should they go? What should they do?

Well, other than listening to the Book Thinkers podcast and this episode, which was really excellent, good job. Like, you got a lot out of me. I don't know how much more than there is anywhere else. But there's also— I have my own podcast. It's The James Altucher Show. I have on people ranging from Richard Branson to Tyra Banks to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, speaking of basketball.

Speaking of basketball, how'd that happen?

Yeah, no, just he had a book and I reached out to him and said, hey, I'll help you promote it. And I don't know, I've had on real, like, everybody who was my hero forever. Like, I had Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, Sara Blakely, billionaire founder of Spanx, just so many interesting people. I've had on Andrew Yang, you know, who I really like, but I also had on the presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party today. And later on I have the, the, this guy who's running for mayor of New York City. He's the front runner, Eric Adams. And, you know, it's fun. I love podcasting. You learn a lot.

James, amazing conversation. Thank you so much.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Nick. I really appreciate it. And I'm happy to come on anytime. And I really enjoy all your stuff. So, good luck and keep doing it.

That is a wrap. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this week's episode of Book Thinkers: Life-Changing Books. To discover more books, more mentors, and more resources that you can use to achieve more and live better, make sure you check out our website at www.bookthinkers.com. There you'll find links to our mobile application, more podcast episodes, our shop so you can get some Book Thinkers swag, and our socials. With that, I'm signing off and I'll see you for next week's episode of Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books.