The James Altucher Show

It's the most commonly believed lie. It will make you lose all your money. It'll make you wake up in your 40's or 50's and wonder what you're going to do about retirement. It will make you develop your worst possible habits.   For me, it was drinking. And waking up face to floor. I was ugliest when I was unhappy. That's true for everyone.   Unless you hide it with plastic surgery and cocaine.   The point is I care about myself now. And not a lot of people say that.   But it's important.   I should care about me more than anyone else... even my daughters. But sometimes I mess up. Sometimes I love them more than me.   Even on airplanes, they say, "Put your mask on before assisting others." If you put a mask on your baby before you put a mask on yourself, your baby will never know who you could've been.   If I don't put my oxygen mask on first everyday, then my kids, my friends, everyone I meet, won't know who I really am.   They won't know me at my best. They'll know me passed out on the floor because I tried starving myself for three days (it was a fast. I was trying to detox my body. Again this goes back to caring about yourself. Molly, Josie, I swear, I had good intentions.)   Let me get back to the most commonly believed lie.   It's called the sunk cost fallacy. This is when you stick to what you're doing because you already invested your whole life in it.   For example, you won't quit your job (the job you hate) because that's what you went to college for or because you've been doing it for 20 years and change is scary.   I studied computer science. I went to graduate school for it.   But now I do what I love. Because I gave up.   I had to give up on life's little stresses and jump head first into an even bigger stress. It took me one step closer to bottom. And one step closer to the lifeboat.   I have a friend. She's 52. Or 53, divorced. She has a "low-level" job. Or that's what she says.   She thinks her goals are out of reach. She says, "I can't do it." And she believes it. So I asked my friend Susan David, (she's a Ph.D) "How can you help someone like that? How can you help someone struggling with life's circumstances?"   But I was asking the wrong question. Because she told me the stress people experience everyday isn't (usually) caused by massive life events.   "There's a particular kind of stress that, in psychology, we call allostatic stress," Susan said, "It's the everyday stress."   I was interviewing her about her book, "Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life."   She gave 50 or 100 tips to do exactly what the subtitle of her book says, "Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life."   1) Accept it "Accept that you aren't where you want to be," Susan said. "Be with those difficult emotions."   She said we get stuck in two ways. One is "bottling." The second is "bruting." Bottling is when someone traps emotions inside. They ignore their feelings.   Bruting is when someone obsesses about emotions. And try to determine what happened and why...   They both cause high levels of anxiety.   So I had to stop asking, "Why?"   2) Choose "want-to" goals I have four main values. They're in my daily practice.   Values are the things you want to do versus the things you have to do. Because "have to" goals are less likely to be successful.   So I asked Susan, "What if you don't know what your values are?"   "We often turn around and say, 'How did I get here?'   "I was just going on with flow. I was just doing what everyone else told me to do. I went to college. I got a job. I got a house... How did I get her?' This is a really difficult place for people to be" she said. "What's really critical for all of us to realize is values are not some abstract idea. Values are ways of living, ways of being."   Figure out your values. Susan says, at the end of the day ask yourself, "What did I... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

5 Jan 20171h 10min

Kamal was totally lost. His father had died. His job over. His relationship gone. He felt adrift, depressed, broken. He was so lost he wandered the world trying to find his way back. Twenty years later he wrote the novel about what happened - REBIRTH. The novel is about how he discovered for himself the ancient art of the pilgrimage. How to be a wanderer. How to be lost in a world with too much GPS raining down. Would a pilgrimage, a wandering, solve his problems? I read Kamal's book. The book comes out today. I had him on my podcast (also out today). I wanted to find out how even in our daily lives we can go on a pilgrimage. Even if I'm in a cubicle, can I break free, can I become a wanderer Sometimes I also feel stuck. But I don't want to go away for months at a time. I want a pilgrimage in my life right now! From what I can gather from reading the book, REBIRTH, and talking with Kamal, a pilgrimage has several parts: A) SEEKING AN ANSWER Something happened. Something confusing. Something that wasn't in the plan. You have to get off the regular path. Try a new one. Try one that takes a bit of courage and discipline. To meet stranger along the way B) IT TAKES TiME I'm not a believer that you have to go to a far location. But take time for yourself each day to do something you've never done before. Think about things you never thought about before. Find the places in your life that you never looked before. They are there every day. The pilgrimage awaits. Do a dare you never would have dared to before. C) STRUGGLE Maybe some people find life easy. I don't. Life is filled with worries about money, about relationships, about (for me) kids, about decisions, about the people who hate you, who annoy you, who scare you. Anxieties, regrets. Every pilgrimage begins with the struggle. And every journey is a struggle. The struggle doesn't stop. It just changes. It changes into one where you are lost to one where you have vision. Where the struggle is not being trapped in the vision of others but for the unique impact that you want to create. D) BENEFITS OF A PILGRIMAGE: - You see more clearly: Everything you see on a pilgrimage is different from "normal life". Enjoy them. Learn from it. Even a single day, a single meeting, can be a pilgrimage. What is your takeaway from it. - You meet people. I like to pretend everyone has a fortune cookie to give me. A little bit stale, a little bit crunchy, with a folded message inside. Read it. - There's an end. We've made pilgrimages too easy. We can go to a museum and see 2000 works of art. It used to be that people would travel a 1000 miles to see one painting hanging up in a chapel. Then you can really appreciate what you see. The more you appreciate the people, the things, the emotions around you, the more you are a pilgrim. - Come back changed. A pilgrim doesn't just fly a plane from LA to NY. A pilgrim changes because of the journey. You do that by using your senses: listen more, see more, taste more, observe more. The convenience of modern society comes at a price. It's too difficult now to be a pilgrim because everything is two taps away on our phone. There is an "otherness" to being disconnected for a bit. To search. To wander. And finally, to give up looking. To surrender to the results. ---- It's freeing to give up, even for a few minutes, everything you ever knew. To become a Wanderer. To look around and see everything as if it were new. REBIRTH, by Kamal Ravikant, got me thinking about these things. He went on his pilgrimage. He met people. He went on an adventure, a journey, and reading his book showed me how. I need to leave. To struggle. To find an answer. And then to completely give up all hope of ever finding one. To find again the beauty of being completely lost. If I get lost enough, maybe I can find something worth looking for. ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

3 Jan 201758min

"When I was a struggling writer, before I wrote my first book, I got 190 rejection slips."   He taped them to the walls like a serial killer.   "My wallpaper was rejection slips."   "What was the worst one...," I asked Ben Mezrich, a New York Times bestselling author. Over the past five or six years, I've probably read all of his books. He wrote "Bringing Down the House," which became the movie "21". He wrote, "Accidental Billionaires," which became "The Social Network" where Jesse Eisenberg played a seemingly evil Mark Zuckerberg.   The New Yorker sent him just a page with the most powerful word known to man.   "It was just, 'No,'" Ben said, "I was rejected by a janitor at a publishing house because I sent a manuscript to an editor who was no longer working there and the manuscript ended up in the trash can. A janitor took it out of the trash, read it and sent me a rejection letter."   That was his big chance. Not Ben's.   The janitor.   "I've never wanted to write a book," Ben said. "I wanted to write. I wanted to write a hundred books."   I was interviewing him about, "The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway."   They found these cows in the 70s. It looked like they were sliced with a laser. They had perfect slices of circles in their abdomens. Like pancakes. And they were completely drained of blood.   The FBI investigated.   There was no mess. No blood spill.   Then pilots started seeing UFOs. Ben says if a pilot sees a UFO now, they'll get fired for reporting it.   So I asked him, "Isn't there a freedom of information act?"   "They've tried," he said. "But they didn't even admit Area 51 existed until a few years ago. So, no. They don't have to release that information."   People lose their minds looking for answers. Questioning can be interrogative or art. Answers birth more questions. And the space between answer A and question B is just space.   And that's where Ben's books are created.   "I only go into the stories where it's larger than life or something happens," Ben said. "What leads up to that incredible moment? What leads up to Facebook being a billion dollar company or what leads up to a guy suddenly believing in UFOs?"   I asked about his writing process. And selling process.   "I write by page not by time," he said.   If he's writing a 300 page book, he does this:   Step 1: introduce characters Step 2: introduce love interest Step 3: introduce what they're trying to achieve / their goal (You're starting off with the obstacles.)   That's part 1.   Step 4: "At the end of 100 pages something happens -- something that makes it very difficult for the characters to achieve their goal."   Ben said, "When I'm interviewing people, I'm thinking of their lives as chapters."   Interviewing is part of Ben's writing, but it's also part of his selling process. He won't write a book that won't sell.   "How do you know?" I asked.   "Usually, I speak to the main character enough to get a book proposal," he said. "Then I do all that research. Then I do an outline (very specific, in fact, I know how many pages each chapter is. It's like a skeleton. It's very severe.)"   My dreams don't have skeletons.   They usually look like boneless blobs or liquid sliding downstream. Direction over details. That's what Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert told me.   I get stuck because I want to do everything at once. I want to read every book, go for a walk, fly around New York City, interview Carly Simon, Edward Thorpe, Carrie Fisher (who I'm sad I missed sharing her stories with you... we were going to meet when she returned from the UK). I want to spend time with my daughters, begin and win at all my dreams, but I also want to do nothing.   Sometimes I get so worked up dreaming of the millions of directions I could fly that I forget to take off.   But it's ok.   Because I have something to write about. I have a connection... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

29 Dec 20161h 3min

How can you use mass hypnosis to control 60,000,000 people so they vote for you to become the leader of the world? Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, knows the answer and has known it for years. So I called him and asked. I needed to know. He told me how Trump won. And he told me how anyone can use these persuasion techniques to improve their lives. What if you can get people to do whatever you want just by using the right words and subtly hypnotizing everyone you meet? It sounds like a science fiction novel. But it's true. It's what happened, and it happens every day. Who are the victims? You're the victim. Scott Adams predicted in September 2015(!) that Donald Trump would become President because, "he is the best master persuader I have ever seen." Scott Adams trained as a hypnotist and master persuader for years. "Once you realize that everyone is completely irrational," Scott Adams told me, "your life gets a lot easier. "You can start to use the principles behind this to see why people really do things, as opposed to using rational facts, and then use that to your advantage. "Understanding that people are irrational has made my life a lot better." But how did he predict a year and a half ago that Trump would win? I needed to know how. And how I could do it. Trump was the unlikely choice to be President. Just like Scott was the unlikely choice to be one of the world's most popular cartoonists with Dilbert. But we can all learn the skills that Scott learned. Scott heard a story that made him want to change his life in his 20s. His mother had delivered birth to his sister without the use of anesthetics. She was hypnotized. "She felt no pain," Scott said. So Scott, in his 20s, learned all the techniques of hypnosis. "You mean," I said, "You can take a gold watch and swing it in front of their eyes and make them do what you want?" "That has never happened," Scott said, "Except in movies. "What you learn is that basically everything people do is completely irrational. And then they rationalize it later. "Like, they might say they voted for Trump because of his policies but this is just a rationalization. Everyone is irrational and everyone is subject to persuasion." Everything seemed against Trump. But somehow he beat 16 candidates in the primaries and one big candidate in the election. And, Scott says, all the theories as to why he won have been wrong. So I called him up and asked him what happened. And he told me: ----------------- - THE LINGUISTIC KILL SHOT "Trump described everyone using two techniques: - words that had never been used in politics before - words that were visual. So every time you looked at the candidate being described you would look for confirmation bias." Example: Jeb Bush he described as "low energy". "Low energy" had never been used to describe a candidate before so they stood out. And whenever you looked Jeb, unless he was jumping around, you would automatically look for clues that showed he was low energy. Trump systematically did this with everyone who was frontrunner against him, including "Crooked Hillary" which referred both to her legal troubles and the persistent rumors that she was sick. ------------------ - CHARISMA = POWER + EMPATHY Scott said, "Trump clearly had the Power part down. But he was low on Empathy. "So he used polling to figure out what the critical issue was for the most amount of people and came up with Immigration. By going with this issue he proved he had empathy with his base. "Expect him as President to try to show empathy to a much larger group of people." ------------------ - OVERSELLING THE STORY "Trump consistently oversold his point. For instance, 'Build a Wall'." He used hyperbole because it's the direction that counts. "It didn't matter that the facts didn't support him. His base was listening to the direction while all the media was getting bogged down in the weeds. "And... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

27 Dec 20161h 6min

"When did you decide to go from being a lawyer to a full-time writer?" I asked Gretchen Rubin. She wrote the #1 New York Times bestseller, "The Happiness Project." It was 2001. "At the Supreme Court, I was surrounded by people who loved law. They were reading law on the weekends. They were talking about law at lunch time. They just loved, loved, loved law. And I knew that I didn't." I felt pain in my legs. That's the feeling I had in my body the last time I didn't love something. I couldn't sit around anymore. I got up mid-meeting, walked straight to the elevator and left. "I think a lot of people want to leave what they're doing, but they don't know where to go," Gretchen said. A) How to find where to go "I was looking up at the capitol dome," Gretchen said, "And I thought, 'What am I interested in that everybody in the world is interested in?' That's when she wrote her first book, "Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide." Her first step was research. That's also what she did for fun. "That's a big tip-off," she said. "What do you do for fun?" I loved talking to prostitutes at HBO. But if I stayed I wouldn't have my own podcast. I couldn't talk to anyone I wanted. I was limited to prostitutes. And it wasn't their fault. I didn't know if it was OK to want a better life. I kept waiting for people to notice the signs. I wanted them to worry about me and encourage me to do what I love. But each situation is different. And you can't always ask for advice. Advice is what other people would do if they were you. Not what they actually do as themselves. We try guiding each other with good intentions... but it's not the same as choosing yourself. B) Be you Gretchen has 12 commandments of happiness. And the first one is "Be Gretchen" so for me it'd be, ''Be James." But sometimes I feel really disconnected to myself. Gretchen's suggestions involve knowing a lot about yourself. So I asked her, "What if I don't know anything about myself?" "That is the great question of our lives. 'What does it mean to be you? Who are you?'" "It seems so easy because you hang out with yourself all day," she said. "But it's so easy to get distracted by who you feel you should be... or who you wish you were. Or who other people expect you to be." It's almost like we outsource our personality to everybody around us. But it's OK to stop doing things that should make you feel good, but don't. "I had this weird experience recently," Gretchen said. "I was at a cocktail party. And some woman, very nice person, was saying 'Oh I love going skiing with the whole family. It's a great vacation.'" Gretchen said it seemed great. But skiing doesn't appeal to her. At all. "I love the fact that my husband has a knee injury so I never feel like we have to go skiing." The woman tried convincing her. She said it's a beautiful adventure, great for the whole family and everything else. "Twenty minutes later she came back to me with this absolutely stricken expression on her face. And she said, 'I just realized I don't like skiing either...'" Here's an easy, two-step formula for being happier: Step 1: Do less of what you don't like doing Make a list: 10 things you do but don't like doing. (Unless you don't like lists...) Step 2: Do more of what you like doing Come up with all the things you daydream about. What have you always wanted to try but never had time for? BAM! Now you have time. And you're you. C) Use envy Gretchen was looking through a magazine from her college. She read about the other lawyers. And felt mildly interested. Then she saw people with writing jobs. "I felt sick with envy," she said. "Envy is painful, but it's a very helpful emotion for a happy life. It's a giant red arrow sign standing over someone's head saying, 'They've got something you want.'" I've learned there are three types of self-help books. One is you're telling people what to do. The other is... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

22 Dec 20161h 10min

Dan Ariely was burned all over his body. He lived in the hospital for years. He grew up there. Now he writes about pain. And irrationality. And meaning. He had nerve damage from the burns. And no skin to protect himself from pain. The nurses slowly peeled back his bandages. He begged them to rip them off.   They wouldn't. He wanted quick pain and fast relief. They did it slowly for peace of mind. Not his. Theirs. Dan calls this "irrational behavior." He says, "being irrational are the cases where we think we will behave in one way, but we actually don't. And the reason I care about this is because those are the cases in which people are likely to make decisions." He helps predict behavior. So you can respond the way you'd expect you would... not the way you actually do. "It's an interesting conflict," he says. We talked about his new TED book, "Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations." ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

20 Dec 20161h 6min

Steven Pressfield wrote all of the greatest books for writers. He's a pro. And in part 1 he talks about turning pro. Now he talks about HOW to develop your skills. "I have a writing practice," he says. "And what that sort of means is you detach yourself from the outcome and you're looking at the long picture. If somebody says to me, 'Steve you're gonna live to be 97.8 years old. Are you going to be writing the last day of your life?' I'll say, 'Yes.' And I don't give a shit if it sells or not. I'm in it." Be in it. Because it's not just a habit... it's your life.   ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

15 Dec 201639min

HOW TO GO FROM AMATEUR TO TURNING PRO? I had a full time job. I was trying to run a business on the side. I was pitching two TV shows. And I was obsessively playing chess day and night and traveling to tournaments. And nothing was going well. My attention was scattered. I was unhappy. I felt stuck. One time I was talking to one of the partners in my side business, Randy Weiner. I said to him, "I'm reading this fascinating book about chess endgames". He said, "I don't care about that! Why are you even looking at those books? Chess is a game for kids. You should be working at this business full-time." The next day I quit my job. I joined the business full time. I never played in another chess tournament ever again. I stopped pitching TV shows. I went from being an amateur to being a pro. Which is why I'm glad the other day I spoke to Steven Pressfield, author of "Turning Pro", "The War of Art", "The Legend of Bagger Vance", "Do the Work", and more than a dozen other great books and novels. Sometimes it seemed like each new low was lower. And often the highs were higher. But I haven't had a job since. Ever since I made the decision to turn pro, I've been free. It took me two years of asking before Steven finally agreed to do the podcast. I've read all his books twice. But I was still scared to death right before the podcast. Steven and I spoke for two hours about turning pro, writing, how to improve, how to achieve peak performance in any field of life. I wanted to ask questions nobody else would ask him. Two hours later I feel good about it. The podcast is coming out later today. Here is some of what we spoke about: - HOW TO DEAL WITH THE DEMONS When I join a gym, I go until I stop going. Then it basically teeters off. I'm an amateur at going to the gym. Every single day I write. If I don't do it for two days in a row I feel physically sick. But so many times I feel bad about what I am working on. Or I feel unsure if I should work on the next book. or try the next new idea. The demons come up. I get blocked. I get frustrated or scared. Will I be a failure? Have I run out of ideas? Steven wrote several books about these very demons. Steven said, "those thoughts are 'the Resistance'. "Every time you want to go from a lower level to a higher level - becoming an entrepreneur., get in better shape, meditate, be an artist - the Resistance will ALWAYS attack. Every writer or entrepreneur feels the Resistance every day." Recognize each thought as it comes up, he said. Identify the thoughts that are the resistance. Say, 'that's the resistance". "There's no way to get rid of The Resistance. Be aware of it. Say to yourself, these thoughts won't help me achieve my dreams." - KEEP THE EGO OUT A friend of mine started a company once. It was clearly a bad idea. But he thought it was a homerun. This is a cognitive bias. We tend to believe that if we pour our heart and soul into someone (our personal "investment") then it's a good idea. When I do something I have to constantly stop and ask if I'm smoking my own crack. One time I made a website I thought was brilliant. It had an IQ test on it. And it was a dating site. And it would tell you if you were smart or stupid and you can then date people and know their intelligence. I thought it was brilliant! My six year old daughter told me, "Isn't this kind of mean?" My daughter refused to light my crack pipe. Steven told me he had to make sure with his most recent novel, the autobiographical "The Knowledge" that he had to keep his ego out of it. "I had to put some distance between myself and the writing because it was about my early struggles as a writer." - EVEN A PORN DIRECTOR CAN BE A MENTOR: Steven told me about how he switched from writing bad novels to going into screenwriting, to finally getting back to writing novels. It's important to keep switching around, to pursue every angle of an interest.... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

13 Dec 20161h 3min