Treat Your Life As An Experiment | James Altucher | Modern Wisdom Podcast 138

James Altucher is a chess master, writer, entrepreneur, investor, podcaster and comedian. Overcoming our life's natural inertia is hard. We overplan, overthink and hold off starting a plan because we're not ready. Today James takes us through his approach for experimenting with life and jumping into new things feet-first. This is the second in a two-part episode with James, they can be enjoyed separately or together. I figured I'd try experimenting with ideas too! Extra Stuff: Buy Choose Yourself - https://amzn.to/2GlYDYd Check out James' Website - https://jamesaltucher.com/ Follow James on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jaltucher Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #jamesaltucher #chooseyourself #experiment - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is James Altucher. Part one of this conversation was earlier in the week, but if you're just tuning into this, it will make sense, stands on its own merits as well. Today, we are talking about how to conduct experiments in your own life. Me and James kind of got on to how he deploys the ideas that he has on a very regular basis, and he just kind of jumps in feet first. So, we talk about him practicing stand-up comedy on the subway train in New York. We talk about how Ryan Holiday managed to become one of the biggest writers on the planet by essentially

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  helping Robert Greene to write books. I just love the way that James comes across with such a fearlessness to do things in life. He really overcomes that inertia and that natural laziness that we all have. Loads to take away from today, the first ever two-parter for Modern Wisdom, which is my version of a little life experiment this week. James, you're a legend, man. Thanks so much for coming on. Please welcome the wise and wonderful James Altucher.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  Right, so we're talking about date night, we're talking about ideas. What did I have in my head? That was it. That was it. Cool. One of the things that I was talking about recently was with an ex-marines officer from the UK, and he was talking about his time over in Afghanistan, and he was a Somalia pirate hunter, Somali pirate hunter, was like his second sort of career after he left, left work in Afghanistan. And he was talking about just how different life is out there. And he said he was talking about singing the praises of travel and new experiences. And what you've suggested to there about the idea generation and how important it is, is you kind of don't really know what you like until you, until you try to do something.

• 2:09Chris Williamson?

  And our sample size, the sample size of experiences that we're working with is so, it's such a fraction of the total potential number of experiences that you could have as a human, right? Like, unless you try something, how do you know whether you do or don't like it?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Right, like, people often think to themselves that they could think...

• 2:29Speaker 01

  They can think their way to their passion. There's no way to figure out what your passion is with just your brain. You have to do things. There's no thinking. You have to actually do in order to know. And that's critical. That's why, that's why travel is interesting. If you're, if you're the sort of person who benefits a lot from travel or, or, you know, if you enjoy traveling, travel to as many places as possible to see where you like, what you like to do, what you like to do in each place. For me, I like to experiment with these different ideas because again, I'm not going to know until I do something. I'm not going to know what it's like to write. Like I could think of a great plot in my head for a novel, but I'm not going to know what it's like to write a novel unless I sit down and write it.

• 3:15Chris Williamson?

  One of the things this.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  But by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt, but this is very important distinction because it's the difference between learning something in school and, and the real world. Because in school, no matter what you do, the thing you're most learning is, the thing you're most learning in a classroom are classroom skills. You can only learn real world skills in the real world. There's no other way.

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  One of the things I've been thinking about recently, we're at the start of the year, new year, new decade, new year's goals. How do I relate my 25 year vision to my five year epoch, to my one year, medium term goals, to my daily habits and routines and blah, blah, blah. So I've kind of been swimming in the masturbatory world of personal development for the last little while, just because I do quite like to look at that sort of stuff. And I speak to a lot of the guys on this podcast. And certainly one of the things that it appears to be there is quite a top down approach to how you should experiment with your life. That getting distracted by shiny things and pivoting, as it's called, that's like,

• 4:23Chris Williamson?

  that's the Silicon Valley term for it, right? It's like you can pivot with your particular brand direction or your particular goals should only be done at the end of particular review periods because you don't know whether or not you've squeezed everything out of the lemon in the interim. But the problem with that is a lot of passions are emergent, not dictated. You know, like your passions in life aren't, I thought of this thing and then I'll think about how to do the plan and the this, that and the other. I could think it would be fucking great to do a podcast, which I did two years ago. But it wasn't until I did the podcast that I was like, oh. This is actually really, really cool. Get to talk to loads of interesting people. This is the sort of thing I want to do. And then stupidly, at the start of last year, decided to linchpin myself to a twice a week publishing schedule. But now, now, now I want to do that.

• 5:08Chris Williamson?

  And now I'm like, oh, can I do three? Shall I start doing YouTube videos? Shall I start doing short form content, blah, blah, blah? But I don't know until I do that. And I do think a lot of the time we, we consider, I certainly know that I do and the listeners might do as well. I consider the barriers, um, not necessarily the barriers to entry, but kind of like the skill set that I need or the amount of planning and understanding that I need in order to be able to get an idea moving. It's like, oh, well, you know, like you, the Trump thing, right? The Trump's card thing.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:35Chris Williamson?

  Right, well, if I sit down, if I, if I knock the back end of this week off and I don't go away this weekend, I could maybe sit down and begin to do a plan about what the brand name might be. And then once I've done, do you know, it's so pedestrian and so slow. Whereas it seems like you're just pants off.

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  Gear out, jump into the pool, feet first. Here I am.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:59Chris Williamson?

  This is what we're doing.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, some things though are hard. Like, let's say from the podcast, you want to say, well, I'm going to also make it big on YouTube. YouTube videos that really work and the YouTube channels that really work require a lot more production value than a podcast usually to succeed. And let's say succeeding means, you know, getting a million views on a, on a YouTube video. And may, and it also requires some consistency. You might have high production value for 50 videos in a row without any success. And then the 51st video becomes wildly successful because you've started to find your voice on YouTube. And, and after that, it's, it's all systems go. And you might say to yourself, you know, you might, this is where you might think, okay,

• 6:42Speaker 01

  that's not an experiment I'm willing to try because I'm not that into it. Or it doesn't excite me that much. Yeah, sure, it'd be great to be, have a 50 million YouTube subscribers, but I just don't want to put the time in right now because I'm enjoying the time I'm doing on other things. So a lot of the experiments I described, I figure out, does make money? Some of those don't. You kind of experiment on what will make money, what doesn't. And like, I always think to myself, man, I wish I did have more presence on YouTube. And I try, I experiment a little, but I can see it is going to require more effort than, um, than my personal compass is telling me to put in. That said, I just started experimenting with TikTok, which is totally different.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  And I'm kind of enjoying the creativity on TikTok. And so I don't really care how many followers I get or how many views I get. It's just kind of fun. And so, so if I have a few free moments, I might try another TikTok video or something. Cause it doesn't really require as much, as much effort, as much production value to create a decent TikTok video.

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  These low friction, low time and resource investment ideas seem to be the sort of thing that's quite fun to play around with. I have to say, you know, quite embarrassingly, I am, despite being a businessman slash entrepreneur of one kind or another for the last 13 years. I, I'm certainly in the camp that I described, one that maybe moves quite sort of pedestrianally with things, very considered.

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  It's an attention to detail, but it's just, it's, it's borderline just like neurotic and, and, and, and very restricting when it comes to things like that. I certainly think if I was, um, you know, if I was able to move a little bit more towards that expedited, look, that's this, it's an idea. It's an idea. Just have a crack at an idea. Maybe I wonder, wonder what would be like to do salsa dancing. Or I wonder what it would be like if I learned to public spit, blah, blah, blah. And I just fucking go to a class, like, don't think about, don't research which is the best class, like just go to the class.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Like a couple of years ago, I was, I took a bunch of ping pong lessons, by the way, and I.

• 8:54Chris Williamson?

  Is this so you could get good at spin?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Uh, potentially. I was already pretty good, but I wanted to get better. And, um, I, uh, I took classes in other things. And then I wanted to also, this was going to be the year I was going to sit down and write a novel. I've written a lot of nonfiction books. I hadn't written a novel. And then one day. I went up on stage and did stand-up comedy at a comedy club and I loved it. And so if I had made myself a goal, this year I'm doing a novel and nothing's going to get in the way. And I'm not going to be distracted by shiny objects. I never would have tried stand-up comedy and I loved doing it. And it was a difficult skill to learn, but I decided, you know what? I love this so much, like my, my inner compass is telling me this is a direction to go.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  So I said, okay, no novel and I'm just going to focus on this. And it's like five years later, I'm still, you know, actually I'm headlining at a major club in New York City. Uh, this weekend, so you know, thank you.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  That's incredible.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so your, your inner compass kind of tells you which directions to go. And I gave up the ping pong classes. I gave up some other things I was trying, uh, gave up writing the novel and focused on this, on this one thing, without it hurting my business. I run an entire business without hurting my business. So, cause you know, stand-up comedy is at night and the business is during the day.

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. I think, again, having looked at the, the productivity world and the listeners will be familiar with this, that they say your true calling in life is at the intersection of, uh, what you're good at, what you love to do, what you can be paid for and what society needs. And trying to create this Venn diagram and map on this sort of weird polygon with all of the different attributes of whatever it is that you do and blah, blah. It does feel like kind of putting the cart before the horse a little bit with this stuff. It's like, look, like if you just, if you just do the thing, if you just make the experiment, reality will reflect back to you whether or not it's a good idea. Your visceral day-to-day experience of it will tell you whether or not you enjoy it.

• 10:59Chris Williamson?

  The success that you have in it will tell you whether or not you're any good at it.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Right. Because, because think about like, let's take that Greenland experiment I did, I did earlier. The world didn't need me to do it and, uh, I wasn't necessarily good at it. Uh, you don't really know anything until you start doing it and there's result. You get some feedback and you, and the feedback's good enough that you're like, oh, I want to keep doing it. Look, here I am, five years into the comedy thing. The world certainly doesn't need me telling jokes to them and.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  The world has not decided yet to pay me for it. So it's a matter of you don't really, you don't really know what that Venn diagram looks like until you're already there. And then, so you just have to kind of like try things and follow your heart. And this doesn't mean quit your job and only do things you love. But, but it does mean experiment a lot. Experiment in some things that make money right away. Experiment in some things that might make money 10 years in the future. By the way, it's the intersection of all of your interests where you'll probably find you make the most amount of money in the end. So you have to have though, interests that you get good at to have an intersection to those things until you even know what's going to happen at that intersection.

• 12:17Chris Williamson?

  It's a unique offering, isn't it? You know, this is one of the, one of the things that I think about the totality of our experience. And as, as you get older, you know, I've just, I'm 31, I'm 32 this year. And I'm getting to the stage now where I'm able to actually genuinely say that I have like a curated list of different, different interests. Cause like at 25, you just get ragged around by life. It's like, oh, I found myself in a ping pong club. And then one time I fell into a swimming pool and I swam for a bit. Like you, the, the, um, range, the broadness of your perspective of life experiences. There's not, I don't feel like you have enough time to be able to piece together. Oh, well, this is a commonality between this and this.

• 13:00Chris Williamson?

  And oh shit, I actually know a guy that is a chef in a secret restaurant who actually plays ping pong on a weekend and does this, like, you know, I, it's now starting to at least piece together where I can see some of the commonalities between these different things. And interestingly, I actually did an exercise today that was working out my core values, which I've never done before. And I found that to be really interesting to try and look back at what are the different things, all of the, all the different stuff that I enjoy in life was involved with one of these five core values. It was, it was really interesting.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and, you know, again, what happens is, is that.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Trying different things, you're gonna, if you get good, or even mildly good, even mediocre, at like a bunch of different things that you've been experimenting with, you never know when the intersection of those things turns into something huge, even if the pieces never made money for you, or never got huge. But, but if everything's aligned with your core values, so that means the intersection should be aligned with your core values, it's gonna, it's gonna work out somehow at the intersection. So for instance, 30 years ago, I started writing every day. I didn't make a, I didn't make a single dime on writing until 11 years, 12 years later. And I didn't make significant money on writing until maybe three or four

• 14:17Speaker 01

  years after that. And, but also during the time, you know, about 20 years ago, I started investing professionally. And at first I was very bad at it. And then I, and then I learned, I came up with ideas to, to learn and get better and better and, and better and better and more and more knowledgeable. Cause I had a very untraditional path towards investing, like I wasn't, and MB, I never studied it. I had to really learn everything on my own. And after about 10, after about 15 years of that, I combined my writing with my investing skill and experience. And I, by that point, I had vast experience investing and knowledge. And I created an investment newsletter, and that made me a significant amount of money. So that made me far more money than investing ever made me. And that made me far more money

• 15:02Speaker 01

  than writing ever made me. Actually, by now, investing has caught up and made me more. But at the time, uh, writing an investment related course, uh, made me a significant amount of money.

• 15:13Chris Williamson?

  It's a unique offering, right? Who else is there that has that particular blend of experiences? It's one of the things that I, the nuance that I struggle with, with all of this is the explore exploit paradigm again. So it's like, look, I don't follow.

• 15:30Chris Williamson?

  Um, I don't, so I, for instance, my favorite podcast is Joe Rogan. One of the reasons I listen to him is because as far as I'm concerned, he's the best on the planet at asking, he's the best man on the planet at asking questions. I don't follow someone who is one tenth as good as Joe Rogan, but also has nine other things that he is one tenth as good at Joe Rogan at as well. So what I'm saying is we follow people who are at the absolute peak within their industry, or we tend to follow people who are the very best within each individual section. And I know that there would be some people who would say, well, it's all well and good saying that you're going to experiment and that you can play around with shiny things, but you're going to get outcompeted by the person who has one fewer thing to do than you do,

• 16:13Chris Williamson?

  and dedicate the same proportion of their time to it.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Right, but let's say, you know, let's say, you know, you found your Joe Rogan's your favorite for an interview podcast. So let's say someone came along who was a better interviewer than Joe Rogan. You probably wouldn't switch from Joe Rogan to this other guy because you like Joe Rogan and you like his style and you, you got to know his story through watching hundreds of his podcasts. But let's say now, uh, there was a great podcast that was a, um, they were telling a serial story about a murder mystery. And, you know, they were calling people up and it was a real, real true crime.

• 16:54Chris Williamson?

  Have you listened to, have you listened to Up and Vanished, James?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  No, is it, is it good?

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  Up and Vanished is my, it's, it's quite, it's like maybe three or four years old. The guy, Payne Lindsay, the guy that created it is just out of this world. This is a real life 10 year old missing person inquiry that had gone cold. And Payne Lindsay, this guy is just like, ah, I just fancy starting a podcast about this, this thing, and starts doing it and then is investigating week on week as he's releasing episodes. So he's iterating live, releasing an episode about what happened in the last week. Then there's a discussion forum, then he starts doing live Q and As. Then he gets like legal experts in to do extra episodes in between these ones where they'll review the evidence, the case evidence. And then at the end of season one, which remember this wasn't planned.

• 17:48Chris Williamson?

  This isn't like some sort of storyline with a fucking arc. At the end of season one, they're going to trial.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  Man, I'll link you to it once we're finished. It is phenomenal. But yes, so.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  But this, but this is a great example of what I'm talking about. Like, I'm assuming that guy is a very good interviewer because he's able to interview enough to talk to witnesses and other people possibly involved in the crime and so on. So he's a good interviewer, but he probably said to himself, you know what? I don't want to do an interview podcast. There's already Joe Rogan. There's already other people out there doing that. Even if I was better than them, nobody really knows if I'm better or not. Nobody could tell the difference between 20% better and 20% worse. So I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna do something completely different. You can't, you can't succeed by just being better. You have to be different also. So, so that was the way he, he thought about doing a podcast and that was the right approach. Like, and that's why he's much, if he had just done an interview

• 18:41Speaker 01

  podcast, he'd be like the other 500,000 interview podcasts.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  I get you. So what we've kind of swam around here is what we discussed before the podcast, something that I think you've been thinking about a fair bit recently, although I get the impression that you think about a lot of different things as well. So this may be like an eon away from you now. But am I right in thinking that you're working on how you can jump the queue with progress in life at the moment?

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, yeah, so we live in, like you, you mentioned before, like we're, we're having, because of this world of abundance, possibly there's this opportunity for an existential crisis. Like, why are we here? What should we do? And I don't think we're having that. Like, just because there's less, you know, factory jobs doesn't mean we're struggling with our purpose in life. Most people didn't really want to work in the factory anyway. But I do think that the life is complex enough that we're switching careers and passions and interests very often in our lives. So I've probably switched careers 12 different times in, in my life, and I'll probably switch it 12 different times again. Who knows? And you always have to say, well, But wait, I'm 40, or I'm 45, or I'm 60, or I'm 70.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  How am I gonna possibly get started on playing golf now? I'm never gonna be the best golf player in the world. So, so A, you have to, you have to figure out, well, what's, what's the metrics for success in my new interest? Like, why do I wanna do this? And not, not as a goal, but just like, how do I determine if I'm making progress, or do I want progress? And then, um, if you do want progress, there's always a hierarchy. There are people who are the worst, and there are people who are the best, and there's a hierarchy from, from first to last. So if you wanna write a book, sure, you could write a book and never publish it. Or you could write a book and self-publish it and have no sales. Or you could write a book, self-publish it, have lots of sales.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Or you could write a book and get huge advances and sell millions of copies and so on. So you have to kinda decide where in the hierarchy, you know, you, you kinda wanna be. And then, no matter what it is, unless it's like, you know, you're 70 years old and you wanna be a professional basketball player, which is, you have to be realistic also, but let's say you have realistic metrics. Then you have to decide, everyone's gonna tell you, you're too old, or you've gotta do this for 20 years at least, or the 10,000-hour rule. You gotta do it for 10,000 hours before you're in the top 1% of, of whatever hierarchy you're, you're joining, uh, whether it's professional this, or, or professional ping pong, or whatever. Comedy. And comedy.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And, and my theory is, is that the 10,000-hour rule only works for very repetitive tasks, uh, like memorizing strings of numbers, for instance, or playing the piano, which has, of course, there's artistic component of playing the piano, but a lot of it is repetitive, just playing over and over again, uh, the same pieces, and that's how you learn, and you get feedback. You do, you get feedback from an instructor, and then you play it again. You get feedback, you play it again. But my theory is you could skip the line with what I call the 10,000 experiment rule, which is, and there's various types of experiments you could do that are better than others. But essentially, every time you do an experiment in, in the area that you're interested in, you'll learn something,

• 21:57Speaker 01

  you'll get better, and you'll also start differentiating yourself and finding your own unique way of doing something that's different from everyone else. So for instance, um... You know, with comedy, there's a British comedian who I admire a lot. His name's Chris Turner, and he has what I call, he has skipped the line. So what he did was, he's been doing stand-up comedy, he's 27 years old. So nobody would say, nobody in the comedy world would traditionally say, oh, he's 27 years old doing comedy? He should be starring in every comedy club in the world. No, they would say, no, he's got to do it a few more years. But he also, if you give him five completely random words,

• 22:41Speaker 01

  he will do the most, within seconds of thinking about it, he will do the most amazing freestyle rap on the fly. It'll be, and rap won't just be like rhyming the words. It'll be so intelligent and so funny, and he just made it up. And I've seen him do it with five random words, like I came up with the random words and he just did it right there. And now he performs in any comedy club in the world that he wants to, because he's not just a stand-up comedian, he also has this other skill. He differentiated himself, he skipped the line. Because he experimented with combining his interest in rapping with stand-up comedy, and that's given him this unique voice in the stand-up comedy world. Nobody else on the planet does that like he does.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And particularly as intelligently as he does. Like even if someone else rapped, they can't do it as intelligently as he does. He's super smart. And so, you know, that's an example. And so for me, I've been able to skip the line somewhat incidentally. Like I said, I'm headlining at Caroline's on Broadway on Saturday. I've been able to skip the line because in part, I've made it a lifelong effort to learn how to learn. So I could pick up lots of different interests and learn very quickly. So I started to use that technique on comedy. And then I combined my podcast with that, where I had some of the best comedians in the world on my podcast. And so I'm able to ask them any question I want. Like, I'll think about the difficulties I've been having the past week in comedy.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And let's say I have this world famous comedian on. I'll say, well, what if this, this, this, and this happened to you? What would you do? And now, nobody else gets that opportunity to ask the top comedians very specific situations about how they would respond. I've gotten, every time they answer a question like that, it's like I skip months and months or years of learning in whatever it is I'm asking. And, you know, and then I've had other opportunities like that that, you know, has helped me skip the line quite a bit.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  Are there some principles or some foundations to skipping the line that are universal or be universally helpful? So I can think of some. One of them would probably be having some form of a platform online or some kind of notoriety that allows you to reach people. You know, that's enabled you to do certain things, get better podcast guests, get when you release a GoFundMe to try and buy Greenland, to garner a little bit of media attention, which then kind of becomes self perpetuating and blah, blah. You mentioned about your ability, learning to learn and stuff like that. Are there any other sort of foundational elements to this?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Well, I think foundational is exercising that creativity muscle and keeping the rest of your lives healthy, emotional, physical and so on. But when you exercise that creativity muscle, you're able to come up with experiments. What can I, how can I experiment to improve this aspect of my knowledge or life or whatever? So for instance, with comedy, again, I was having a hard time coming up with one liners. Like I'm a public speaker for a long time. So that means I'm good at storytelling and humorous storytelling, but coming up with one liners, it's one sentence that gets people to laugh. That wasn't an expertise of mine. So what I did was, here's an experiment I did, took a half hour. I went onto a subway,

• 26:03Speaker 01

  you know, an underground train, you know, subway. And in every stop, I moved from car to car in the subway and I would do stand up comedy in the subway. And now no other person sitting in the subway wanted to hear me doing stand up comedy. So it was really difficult. It was really out of my comfort zone. You have to be a little out of your comfort zone. It's gotta be a little uncomfortable because no one's ever done it before. So it's gotta be uncomfortable. And I had to really tighten up my jokes super hard to get, to get anybody to laugh. And that was an experiment that helped me improve my one liners. And by the way, it also became a story I could tell or a story I could write about.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And in fact, I expanded it even further. I created the entire format of a late night TV show and I had on a guest, I had on a musical guest, all in the subway, audience participation where I'd interview people sitting in the subway because I was starting to get really comfortable with talking with people on the subway. And so- And you know, that experiment didn't really work in the sense that I, you know, I put up a video of my, um, my late night talk show in the subway format. And, you know, I could have kept doing that and made it like a real show, but I didn't really want to, but at least it was an experiment. I had to study the late night format. I had to get, get better at one liners. Again, not great because you'll never be great down there.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And, uh, and it was fun. And then I have a story to tell from it. And look, if that first one was huge, that would have been a different story.

• 27:35Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. It's, um, the, the, the main thing that I've got in my mind is for the listeners, I'm going to break the fourth wall for a second. Uh, James's sound guy, the guy that sets up his sound is called Jay. And all I've got in the back of my mind, when you're talking about this subway thing, is the nightmare that sound guy Jay would have with capturing clean audio.

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm just got, I'm just thinking like Jay's, Jay's gonna have to like, James has decided to have this idea and poor Jay's there lugging along an entire sound desk in a desperate attempt to try and drown out the sound of the subway's wheels on metal.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  I mean, the good thing is though, you get captioned. So we captioned things and had mics on and, and so on. But it was, again, it was a fun, because I did videotape it because that's the other thing too, is you want to be able to have some way of measuring your experiment. So I, so for instance, when I do comedy, I videotape it so I could watch it later. Uh, I try to do that every time. I don't always do it, but I, I try to do it, uh, because you have to be able to measure your, your progress. But, uh, uh, again, like with, with anything, like even with a podcast. So I do two interview podcasts a week with, with guests, usually guests who are somewhat celebrities, famous, whatever. But I'm experimenting with format too. So I'm trying, I'm about to start trying a format that instead of it

• 28:53Speaker 01

  being an hour or two hours, it's 15 minutes where I just tell a little story and maybe there's a co-host who just asks basic questions and then in 15, 20 minutes, it's done. So actually we just did one, it was a little more than 15 minutes, but I had never done this before. Iran, the whole Iran situation happened over the weekend. So Sunday I call, I wanted to know more and I assumed my audience wanted to know more. So I called up a top, uh, military intelligence official. I got the complete breakdown about what was happening. And I ran that the very next day on Monday and I had never done anything like that was an experiment. I'd never done that before. And that will be my most downloaded episode in the past two months.

• 29:31Chris Williamson?

  Wow, how cool is that?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. Yeah, the the short form thing on audio is really interesting. I was having a discussion with Matt from Podcast Notes, who I know will be listening. And I I couldn't work, I like, it's such a Wild West at the moment with this, but I can totally see a place for it. You know, like Naval was doing those three minute long podcasts that was a part of his How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky series. And you're like, who listens to these three minute podcast? But then at the end of it, when he creates a three and a half hour omnibus collage thing of them all, you're actually like, oh, yeah, actually, that kind of makes a bit of sense. So we talked about, we talked about skipping the line. We've talked about the fact that experimenting is an important part of that.

• 30:19Chris Williamson?

  What else? What else have you been thinking about to do with skipping the line recently?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Well, another thing that's important is to, you know, whenever you're in a line, or whenever you're trying to succeed at something, as I mentioned earlier, there's a hierarchy. There's, there's the worst going all the way up to the best, the best all going all the way down to the worst. And the best tends to look down at the worst and whatever. You know where you are in the hierarchy. We're primates, primates tend to know where they, where they are in the hierarchy. The benefit of being human is we could diversify our hierarchies as opposed to being stuck in one tribe. But, you know, there's all sorts of interesting techniques. So for instance, what if you're trying

• 30:59Speaker 01

  to succeed at something, but you take a step back and take a lower job, become the big fish in a smaller pond, but that allows you to then skip four steps forward when, because you become known as the best in this smaller pond.

• 31:18Chris Williamson?

  What's an example of that?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  So a friend of mine was a lawyer, and he finished his law degree, and he wanted to be in the CIA and, you know, the Central Intelligence Agency. And he, he, he couldn't, for whatever reason, so he took an internship.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Usually set aside for people still in their undergrad years, like the first or second year undergrad. Here he was, he's a lawyer. He went to grad school, got a law degree, whatever. He took an internship with the Secret Service and they were like, what are you, the Secret Service, the Secret Service is the part of the White House that protects the president. It's like the guard. And they were like, why do you want to be in the internship program? That's only for teenagers. You're already a lawyer. And he's like, don't worry about it. I'm really interested. So they let him in. And because he was a lawyer, he was able to deliver legal documents to the president occasionally. And in order to do that, he had to get top secret clearance. So now he's the only intern ever who has

• 32:20Speaker 01

  top secret clearance. So he uses that to suddenly get a job at, I think it was actually, I think it was maybe the FBI or the CIA, I forget the exact details. But he got a job at the internship program for the CIA because nobody in the internship program there had top secret clearance and was a lawyer. And then using that, in his spare time, he would listen around, he would look for what are opportunities. Oh, his boss's boss's boss was looking for some potential terrorist. He had time, he tracked the person down. So now he pleased his boss's boss's boss. This guy said, who are you? Well, I'm an intern, I'm an intern, but I happen to be the only intern with top secret clearance and I'm a lawyer. So he got quickly promoted up to the CIA. So he moved much faster. He

• 33:05Speaker 01

  skipped the line, right where he wanted to be at the CIA, by taking two steps backward each time. And that's another interesting technique is to keep your ego out of it. Sometimes you gotta take two steps backward to succeed four steps forward.

• 33:18Chris Williamson?

  Such a good story. I wonder how much, do you think that he had that perfect plan at the time? Because, you know, with hindsight, with the benefit of hindsight, it sounds like the most masterful idea in history.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  I don't know if he had that plan in time, although I will ask him. And but I've known other people who have done similar things. It always seems to be a pretty good technique that works like. Do you know Ryan Holiday and Ryan Holiday's books? So Ryan Holiday is a great writer. He's written several New York Times bestsellers. His last book, Stillness is the Key, was number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. It came out a few months ago. But he started off, he quit college and he started off, he just wanted to be an apprentice. He helped, he helped the author, Robert Greene, do research. So Robert Greene wrote Forty Eight Laws of Power and some other great books. He simply did was like a research assistant for Robert Greene, but he did really well at that.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And then Robert Greene recommended to another company that Ryan should be their head of, you know, help run marketing. He ended up being so good at that, he became the head of marketing. But then he took another step back. He became intern for another writer. He learned a lot. He became, he started helping Tim Ferriss with his marketing because it's a combination of writing internships with, you know, marketing experience. He helped Tim Ferriss. And then suddenly he wrote a book. He knew all the right agents. He knew how to market it. He knew how to distribute it and his books became bestsellers. So, you know, that was a great case of moving a couple of steps backward to achieve his goal.

• 34:53Chris Williamson?

  He's a jit man. Robert is a past, past modern wisdom guest and he's, he's, he's a fantastic guy as well. I mean, that is one baptism of fire, I can imagine, especially seeing the size of Robert Greene's books. Like Forty Eight Laws of Powers and the thirty hours long, I think it's on Audible, something like that.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  Absolute tome and a half. So there's, I can just imagine like a poor, young, slightly spotty Ryan Holiday, like running around, going and getting like going into dusty shelves, getting stuff down off the library.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and he learned a lot like, and you could see the results of Robert Greene's teaching and the way Ryan puts together books. So it's a, it's a, it's a great technique. I mean, for me, I worked at a television company, HBO, and I might go, I wanted to make TV shows, but I couldn't get a job making TV shows for HBO. I had no experience. So I took a job as a junior software programmer for HBO. I was just in the, in the IT department, the software department, and, but my foot was in the door. So I pitched to them, hey, why don't we make an original web show for the internet? And they said, of course, that's a great idea. And so then I took that original web show. I showed how much traffic it was

• 36:09Speaker 01

  getting, and I used it to pitch an actual TV show, and they gave me money to shoot it as a pilot. So again, that was my, that was my way of skipping the line. Like, I was the only programmer ever in the IT department to be shooting a pilot for HBO.

• 36:23Chris Williamson?

  Here's an idea that I've had recently. So I'm starting to do some productivity and leadership coaching within some companies. One's in Germany, one's in, actually in New York. So hopefully I'll be over later this year. And one of the ideas I've been thinking about to just speak to new clients and to kind of just learn what it's like to give a speech to a room, I haven't done a massive amount of public speaking, was I was thinking of just cold emailing a bunch of big businesses who have high-powered sales floors, execs, you know, like real, real sort of go-getter companies, and just saying, look, do you want me to come in and just give a one-hour presentation on how everybody in this office can be more productive if they use a few tools and go about it with a couple of different,

• 37:06Chris Williamson?

  different approaches to the way that they view their productivity? And I was thinking about that, and I was like, well, that's, that kind of sucks. Like, I value my time at more than zero pounds per hour. But on the flip side of that, after doing a few of those, even if no one books me, even if no one decides to get coaching off me, I'll have got a shitload of experience, and I've got some cool stories, and maybe the boss will need a guy that does a podcast in a couple of months' time, and whatever, whatever.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that's a, I don't think that's a bad idea. I think one step... Easier and maybe better, we'll see, is study the company, study what they might be, what maybe they could do better, do your 10 ideas thing and say, oh, here's 10 ideas to improve your sales at this company. I'm not charging anything. I'm happy to come in and talk to you guys or not, but here's 10 ideas. I'm a customer of your company and I really love your product, but I see where things could be a little better. Here's 10 ideas you could just have for free and they're uniquely catered to you. Knock yourselves out. See you later. And just give for free. And you know what will happen is some of

• 38:17Speaker 01

  them are going to respond to you and say, hey, we'd love for you to come in and see what we're up to and maybe talk to us more about this. You know, if you write, if you write 20 emails like that, three or four will certainly respond and say, hey, why don't you come in and hang out a little and, and, and we'll just talk about this.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  You had a really interesting example on impact theory where you were talking about how there's quite a lot of friction, even when someone thinks that they're doing something nice. And they say to you, like, I think your example was, hey, James, like, I'd love to come and be your intern. But then there's actually a whole load of work attached to you. Like, now you've got to find this, this intern. Well, what are you, what are you good at? What do you want me to, what are you going to do? Do you clean the floor? Do you check the emails? Do you respond to the Facebooks or whatever? Whereas you were like, look, if you go to someone and you're like, look, ready-made, here's 10 ideas of how I can help you. Do you want me to help you?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or, yeah, exactly. Like, if you don't give them homework. Like, if they, if you say, I could come in and speak to you, they got to arrange that now. And instead, I wouldn't even say, here's 10 ideas I could do for you. I would say, here's just 10 ideas to make your life better, or make your job better, or make your sales better, whatever. See you later. Nice, nice knowing you. And some people will respond, like, occasionally I get that. Occasionally, some people, somebody will send me, hey, I think here's 10 ways your, your website could be better, or here's 10 ways, here's 10 ideas for your podcast. And, and not just, people all the time throw 10 guests at me, but that doesn't help me. But here's 10 ways to get, here's 10 ways to get in touch with them. And that helps

• 39:52Speaker 01

  me a lot. That's, I've, I've met, I've had a lot of meetings where people have definitely offered value in their emails. And I said, okay, let's talk more about this.

• 40:01Chris Williamson?

  I love that concept. I think. Certainly to differentiate yourself, we've been talking a lot about differentiating yourself. How can you use the uniqueness that you have as a person? And one of the most unique things that we have as people is our networks, right? Like, there's only you, there is precisely only you that knows all of the people on the planet that you know. And now you know one more because you know me. Like, there's precisely you, and that is it. So the power of networking, when you look at that, is it is one way to outcompete every single other person is to utilize your networking correctly.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  And here's the thing, what people don't realize. This is the difference between linear power from your network and exponential power from your network. So I can view my network as, let's say I know 100 people. There's like, draw a line between me and all those 100 people, that's 100 lines. But now, what if you draw lines between all of them, not even including you? So, so let's say you give your connections to your entire network. So now, instead of 100 lines, there's 10,000 lines, because all 100 are connected to all other 100. And that's, when you introduce two people that you think could help each other, they're not going to forget who introduced them. You're still there, even though it's a little more vague.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  You're still in that connection there. And that's the real power of your network, is when you give each other to each other. And, and, and it's the same thing with ideas, you've just got to like, view an idea as a component of your network. Give your ideas freely to people who you think could use them and who would be receptive to them. And give it in as a simple way as possible, so there's no work on their part. So for instance, the very first time I got paid for writing anything, I wrote to a guy who was a writer, and I said, here's 10, I love your articles, but here's 10 ideas for articles I would love to see you write. And I described the articles completely, so it would be almost trivial for him to write the articles.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  And, and, and he wrote back and he said, these are great, why don't you write the articles? And that was the very first professional writing gig I ever had.

• 42:11Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. That's such a good example. Yeah, as you were talking about how you're linking people in together, I was thinking about Kamal, mutual friend of mine and yours, and Michael Kazu, who all of the listeners will know, CEO of Brute Strength, and I linked both of those in yesterday. I was like, just chatting to Michael about something and it just came into my head. I was like, fuck, you need to get Kamal on the Brute Strength podcast, linked them in, and now, now they're away. Michael, I sent, this is a cool one. So I had Aubrey on the show. Aubrey Marcus is the most difficult man on the planet to get hold of, by the way, but his assistant managed to get in with him, and he's in Austin, and Michael, my buddy, CEO of Brute Strength in Austin, and Michael's like, kind of into this self-development space as well, and him and his Mrs. D, they do loads of stuff.

• 42:54Chris Williamson?

  And I was like, it would be awesome. You should totally link up on it. Then they, he went, Michael went, and I think Michael's wife went and did a podcast with Aubrey's ex-Mrs. Whitney, and now, and I was like, the exponential thing. I didn't even link those two people in, but because of the first iteration of that, and then, you know, it's, and it's a good feeling as well.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  It's valuable because it makes you part of the club. It makes you part of the scene that everyone else is trying to build. And it's really important. It's an important skill in today's society to kind of not feel scarce about your network. Like, well, I don't want him knowing him. I only want to know each, each of them. Like, even the first time you and I spoke, I didn't know you were gonna have, I didn't know you knew Kamal, and I said, oh, you should have Kamal on your podcast. Like, just having a reflex of just anybody who can help anybody else, just don't hold back. Like, it's a world of abundance, and, and don't be afraid of, of losing connections by giving them to someone else. That's not how it works. You don't really give a connection to someone else. You copy the connection and give the copy to someone.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  That's a beautiful way to put it. Look, James, man, we've been going for forever. I've taken up so much of your day, but it's-

• 44:07Speaker 01

  It's been great. I, I thank you so much. This is a great podcast. You're a great interviewer, and I was really happy to come on.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  It's been an absolute pleasure. If the listeners want to find out more, where, where should they go to hassle you online or find out your stuff?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Check out my podcast, The James Altucher Show.

• 44:25Chris Williamson?

  Will be linked in the show notes below, as will choose yourself on Amazon. You know what to do if you've enjoyed the episode. Like, share and subscribe. Definitely go and check out James's podcast. Man, it's been awesome. Thank you so much.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Chris. I will talk to you soon.