James Altucher: Journey of Reinvention

It's the worst feeling in the world. When you lose all your money, like I went from 15 million to like you say, $143, and it feels so bad because you're, not only is your net worth gone to zero, so everything you worked so hard for for years is just, it seems to you at that time, it's just, you did it for nothing, but your self-worth is often tied up into your net worth, and I just felt like I was a zero, like everything was bad. I would walk around and I'd see people enjoying their lives and I couldn't even understand what that feeling was like anymore. And I thought I was never going to have that feeling again. Like I thought I was going to have to kill myself. Okay, James, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me on the show. It's a real pleasure. Okay. So let's just dive right in. Can you tell me about the time when you made millions and then obviously you lost everything? What was it like internally just to go from having that kind of abundance and then just to have, I think you had something like $147 in your bank account within a few days. So... What was that like? What was going through your mind whenever this was happening? I mean, no matter what kind of success you have, like whether you, when you work really hard at something and a lot of times it's for money, but sometimes it's for a career. Sometimes it's fame. Sometimes it's to succeed in some hierarchy, whether that hierarchy is a corporation where you want to be the CEO or whether it's a... sport where you achieve a high rank or whatever, if you fall from grace, it just is the worst. It's the worst feeling in the world when you lose all your money and you have, and you worked hard for it. Like, it's not like I, I had started off with zero and made millions by building up really hard to build up a company. Like it's, it's a hundred hours a week or more. And you know, you're responsible for all these employees. You're responsible for payroll. When you're the quote unquote boss, all that means in a startup is that you work for everyone else. You work for your employees. You work for your investors. You work for your customers. Like you work for your family, like because you're trying to provide for them. There is never a free moment in your brain that isn't the potential to be filled with stress. And then you sell it. and you make a lot of money, and it's great. And then for me, I made some bad decisions and lost everything after making millions. I did retire on it, and I thought I had retired, and I said, oh, I'll just start investing because I'm smart enough to make these millions. I'm smart enough to make tens of millions more. And then to lose it all, I went from 15 million to, like you say, $143. And it feels so bad because not only has your net worth gone to zero, so everything you worked so hard for for years, it seems to you at that time, it's just you did it for nothing. But your self-worth is often tied up into your net worth. And I just felt like I was a zero, like everything was bad. I would walk around and I'd see people enjoying their lives and I couldn't even understand. what that feeling was like anymore. And I thought I was never going to have that feeling again. Like I thought I was going to have to kill myself in order to, in order to survive. I thought I was going to have to kill myself. And that doesn't make any sense, but nothing makes sense in your brain at that point. Like I had a life insurance policy where I thought I was going to take care of my, my kids were babies, so they wouldn't remember me and they would be able to survive. And I just. that's how bad I felt. And it was like every day, there's no escape from it. There's no, no moment that will make you happy. Wow. And at what point did you start thinking about rebuilding and what did, what did that process look like for you? Like, how did you take those first small steps to sort of climbing out of that hole? Well, I always, I always needed to rebuild in the sense that I had $143 in the bank at my worst point. And I always needed to rebuild because how was I going to pay the bills? I had two babies and a wife and a mortgage. I, you know, when I had the money, I bought this like a humongous apartment in New York City. So it was crazy amount of expenses I had and I had no money. Like I'm thinking about it now. Like, like my only other alternative was to tell my wife to take the kids, move in with her mom, and I would be homeless. And at some point, I don't know what would happen. But so my only other alternative was to try to figure this out. And I was unemployable in the sense that for the past five or six years, I'd been on my own running, running a business and on my own. And I couldn't, I couldn't imagine, like nobody, I don't even know what kind of job I would have gone for. And so I had written some software to model the stock market. Like, so I made all my bad decisions involved bad. financial investing decisions. So I wrote some software to figure out where I went wrong. Like, why was I so consistently a bad investor? And this was two decades ago, but I figured software would be kind of this, I could remove the emotion from investing and from trading. And what I would do is I had all this stock market data since 1946 and every tick of every stock movement. And I'm just modeled. the stock market and essentially used kind of old-fashioned AI, this is again, two decades ago, to figure out what were significant patterns where you can make money over and over again that people didn't seem to realize. Like a very simple example might be, I'm just making this up, but if Microsoft went down four days in a row, maybe there was a 98% chance it would go up on the fifth day over the past 30 times that had occurred. And so my software was... you know, all night looking for patterns that might have occurred during the day before that were, that the AI was telling me, oh, here's a trade. And then in the morning I would make a trade. Again, I had, I had like other people invested with me. So like I was investing a little bit of money and I would take profits or I take some of their profits and share their profits with them. And so I, and this was in 2002, it was like one of the worst bear markets ever. I mean, 2000. 2008 was a worse bear market, but there wasn't really worse bear markets than 2002, the year after 9-11 and all these wars and all this stuff. And I was only going long, meaning I would only buy the market, even though the market was going straight down. And I needed to make essentially 100% a month on the money in order to survive. And this was a market that was going straight down. But sometimes in markets like that. It never goes straight down in a straight line. There's always a lot of volatility. It goes up, it goes down. People are scared. People are happy. And so the software was doing really well. It actually became the basis of my first book, which is a more financial-based book than some of my other books. But the software worked, and I was making a lot of money every month. Not enough to rebuild any savings or well. There was just enough to pay my bills, but I needed to do that. every single month. I had to be up every single month in the worst market ever at that time to survive. But this wasn't making me happy because this was desperation. I would make these trades and I was just desperately hoping they'd work out or else I was going to die is what I thought. And at some point, I would make these trades and then I would take a walk around. the city because I just wanted to be away from the screen so I wouldn't be addicted to the screen. And I would take a walk around. And one time I passed this restaurant supply store and I'm like, oh, I don't know why I walked into it. I had no interest in restaurant supplies. But I saw this box filled with waiter's pads and they were selling the whole box of waiter's pads for $10 for 100 waiter's pads. So like 10 cents a pad. And I bought it and... I started using these waiter's pads to basically write 10 ideas. Like I went to the cafe the next morning because I never slept. I was up at like five in the morning and go to the cafe and I started just writing ideas. Oh, here's 10 ideas for trading systems. Here's 10 ideas for books. Oh, here's a book idea. Here's 10 ideas for chapter titles. Oh, here's 10 ideas I'm going to write for, you know, this company as if I was the CEO of the company. And I just started writing these ideas. And maybe the ideas were good or maybe the ideas were bad. But after like a couple of weeks, I noticed. I was actually happy for the first time in a couple of years. Like I was excited about these ideas, whether they were good or not. And it kind of occurred to me over time, really, that having ideas is like a muscle. Like people say ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything. This is not true. Ideas are hard to come up with. Like you have to, if you don't exercise that muscle, it atrophies. And execution ideas are a subset of ideas. So if you want to be good at execution. You have to exercise that idea muscle. So I realized I was exercising this muscle and it was giving me all sorts of ideas, not just trading ideas, but like magical things would start to happen when I started implementing some of these ideas. And bit by bit, it took years, but that's how I kind of dug myself out of this pit and survived and built another business and sold that, but then went broke again, unfortunately. Well, I owe you a bit of a thank you, James, because as I mentioned before, that I read, I read Choose Yourself about a decade ago and I was, I had failed at two companies at this stage and I was looking for a job at a London based startup. They were called Fundzing. They were sort of like an Airbnb for experiences before Airbnb did experiences. And after I read Choose Yourself, I was like, why don't I send them 10 ideas? Like I'll do the usual application process, but I'll send them 10 ideas as well for how you. how I could help improve their company, you know? So I sent it and got an interview, got the job. And then because I took that job, that led to the business I'm currently running, which I've been going for over seven years now. So... Will Barron What's the business you're currently running? David Elikwu It's called The Weekend University. It's all about making psychology more accessible. Will Barron Wow. Okay. And you make courses about psychology? David Elikwu Yeah, we do a combination of courses and summits. So we picked like a big topic, like say like addiction or attachment. And we'll do like a summit where we'll interview like, say, 30 of the world's leading experts on that topic over the course of a year. And then we release this as a live event. And then we do a deeper dive course as well into that subject after the summit, if that makes sense. Yeah. So yeah, it works, the 10 ideas. And from a psychological point of view, I'm just wondering, have you thought about why this might be so beneficial? Like, it seems that if you are... if you're exercising this idea muscle, you're sort of engaging your prefrontal cortex, like newer parts of the brain. And it takes you out of this sort of rumination, like the sort of, you know, these like sort of useless loops that our brains get into. Have you thought much about that? Like why this might be so? You know, I haven't, that's really interesting. Like, why do you think it engages the prefrontal cortex, which is also by the way, the part of the brain that is good at assessing risk. And that's why, like, you kind of have a you don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex until you're about 25 years old so that's why you see younger people often take much greater risks than older people and uh but so i'm just curious why you think it engages that part of the brain well i've interviewed a couple of a couple of people on addiction and these would be like these would sort of be the experts at helping people break addictions and what they do in a therapy session is When a client comes to therapy for addiction, they're usually like really deep in shame, right? Which engages these older parts of the brain, like more like the limbic system and all the rest. And if they can successfully get the client curious about what's going on, then apparently there's a link there with getting the prefrontal cortex activated. And then that makes it easier to actually make changes because you're not in these sort of old habitual thought patterns. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And again, I've never thought about it in this context, like what part of the brain is being activated. It always seems to me, though, there is some part of the brain being activated because, again, like I take a look at my example, I was like really depressed and I could not function and I was really miserable. And then the only thing I changed in this period was I started writing these 10 ideas a day down. And suddenly I did get not only happier. but more productive. Like I was able to focus on things again and basically get out of this huge slump I had been in and actually have confidence and think I could try things again. And so there must've been something going on in the brain that I was like activating, like some dormant, again, some muscle, and I call it the idea muscle, but that's just almost a metaphorical term. But there was something that was dormant in the brain that I was suddenly activating again. And it also, I was able to. focus. It's like you sit down. And so I remember the very first idea list. I had this idea for a book. Uh, and I just wrote at the top of the waiter's pad, you know, um, how to beat your friends and family at every game in the world. That was going to be the book. And the idea was to come up with for every game, just very simple tricks, uh, of, of how to beat your friends and family. So like for Scrabble, for Monopoly, for checkers, for chess, for poker, just like simple techniques where that would put you in the top 5%, which is not that hard. you know, you know, let's say, let's say a hundred million people in the world play poker. I'm just talking about techniques that it doesn't make you a pro, but it makes you in the top 5 million of a hundred million. And that's, that's good enough, obviously to beat 95% of the people, i.e. your friends and family. So, so, so I wrote down the, my, my, the first list was like all the games I wanted to, to, to, to put in the book. And then the next list was like, okay, for Scrabble. here's the 10 things. If you know these things, you'll beat everybody you know at Scrabble. For poker, if you know, here are the 10 things, you'll, you know, so, so, and I was excited. And then I would, I would talk to friends of mine and they would get excited. Like, oh, you know, you can make a whole series based on this. Like it could be like a franchise kind of thing. And, and that was just the first idea. I never did the book. The point is not doing the book really, or doing the ideas. The point is exercising the idea muscle. That alone is, is worth it. But it was still exciting and fun. And it took me out of this several year long obsession with getting my money back. And so I could just get a little bit of a break from that pain. And it was good. So it's worth doing just because of the state of mind it leads to for the rest of the day. Because if you do this every day, it puts you into like a just a different frequency. You're just like, yes, that's a good way to put it higher level, you know, so. You can't really lose by doing this. You may have a lot of bad ideas and it's not about the ideas themselves. It's about exercising the muscle and what that then leads to in other areas of your life. Yeah, you're going to have bad ideas. Like if you're doing 10 ideas a day, you can't have 3,650 good ideas a year. You're going to have one good idea a year or two. But the point is some of the ideas might be pretty good and there might be building blocks that lead to good ideas or help other ideas. Like if you're at a job, And it's like, oh, 10 ways to improve this process at work. One of those things might contribute to your being a better employee and improving some process at work or whatever. And like, you know, again, like every day, it's not like I do it at the end of the day either. I do it in the morning because like you say, and I, again, I haven't really thought about it before, but it does improve the rest of the day. Like once I check the box, okay, I've did my 10 ideas a day. Now I could start off and do the rest of the day. but my mind's already active. It's already doing things. For sure. Can you tell us about idea sex? What is idea sex and how can people practice this as well? Yeah. So over time, as you're exercising this idea muscle, you start to develop kind of tricks that are very interesting and you notice them in society, in real life too. And so one of these things I call idea sex, and it's this concept that let's say there's one good idea. in one area of life and then there's a good idea in another area of life nobody's ever combined these ideas before but sometimes combining them i call it idea sex will lead to even better ideas so i'll just give a very you know simple example let's say you love mexican food and you love sushi and you want to start a restaurant well maybe Mexican sushi would be an interesting thing. Like, oh, here's a sushi-rito, like sushi combined with a burrito. And you could come up with 10 ideas that would be on the menu for a Mexican sushi place. And some examples in real life. Well, look, Airbnb is sort of like hotels combined or bed and breakfast combined with the internet. And Uber is like taxi cabs. Combined with, you know, again, phones and using your real car. You know, there's lots of kinds of music. There's like, you know, rap mixed with. Well, actually, the first big mainstream hip hop or rap song was when Run DMC took their rap style and combined it with Aerosmith's, you know, heavy metal style. to make walk this way. And like, there's so many like, or, or again, I'll use from the example of rap because rap is interesting because it, it it's this one medium where it actually encourages idea sex. Like it combines many different musical styles. And like, so the Fugees I remember. They did this song in 1997 or 98, which was based on the Saturday Night Fever movie theme song by the Bee Gees with rap. And of course, it's a no brainer that that's going to be a hit. Like chances are of one things they hit and another things they hit. If you combine it, the results are hit. Star Wars took George Lucas, took science fiction combined with, you know, the traditional Western. combine them together. He took all the tropes and combined them and made Star Wars. So you see this in almost every area of life where you can combine these things and you come up with really new, interesting ideas. Well, like an example, I don't know if this is exactly relevant or not, but something that always stuck in my mind from what you did whenever you're promoting Choose Yourself is that you were one of the first people ever to accept payments by Bitcoin. Yeah. And that led to so many opportunities afterwards. You want to tell us about that as well? Yeah. So in 2013, so I, so starting around 2010, I started writing all these articles and stories about things that had happened to me. And at the time, nobody was doing this. Like people were horrified, like, you know, cause I was in the financial business and people were saying, how could you write, how could you be in the finance business and write about going broke so many times? Like nobody's going to ever. give you any opportunities ever again, which was completely untrue, it turned out. But I didn't care. So for a while, like literally for like a long time, every single day, I was writing another article or story. Like I was just looking at my archives because I was looking for an article I'd wrote in 2011. And I saw in 2011, I wrote 258 published stories. And they weren't like news articles or, you know. two paragraph things. They were like real stories about events that had happened to me. And I did this every single year. So, and the best of those kind of rewritten into a book form became this book, Choose Yourself. And I wanted, I had used mainstream publishers many times. And in fact, my last book was from HarperCollins, a mainstream publisher, but I really wanted to do something. I wanted to combine mainstream publishing with self-publishing. So usually when you think of self-publishing, you think of, oh. you know, it's going to look really bad. There's no designer. You print it up at some, you know, paper store. And now you sell these books out of the back of your car. I wanted to, I wanted to professionally self-publish. So I hired like, and it wasn't so expensive. I hired a designer to design the cover, another designer for interior design, a real professional editor. And I work with real professional marketing people. And One of the things I did with Choose Yourself was I had this idea. A month before I was going to release it, I built a store, an e-commerce store that accepted Bitcoin only. And the only item I sold in that store was my book, Choose Yourself, a month in advance. You can get it a month in advance and you can get a PDF of it. And I sold it for one tenth of a Bitcoin. Bitcoin at the time was $61. So it was roughly $6. You know. Now that would be $6,800, but, you know, one-tenth of a Bitcoin. But I sold each PDF for one-tenth of a Bitcoin. And then I remember CNBC actually had me on TV and, you know, we talked about Bitcoin. I said, Bitcoin's kind of like this choose-yourself currency. And they said, come on, did you really just do this as a marketing gimmick? And I said, well, I'm on national TV right now. So basically it worked. And again, like that was a result of, okay, here's 10 ideas for how to market my book. And that was one of the ideas. That's a brilliant example. You mentioned there about, you know, all these articles. You wrote so many articles out in 2011, over 300. And I've heard you say that vulnerability buys freedom and you never publish something. unless you're scared to do so. So first question here, James, is why, at what point did you decide, okay, I'm just going to be as open and honest as possible and just sort of turn myself inside out almost? What was the impetus for that? Why did you decide, okay, I'm just going to share everything? I think at some point, like in 2009, 2010, it was kind of... you know, at some point I realized I was kind of building all my career always, whether no matter what I was doing, I was trying to always just get people to like me. So like, Oh, you know, when you're when you're an entrepreneur and you're a salesman, as you know, you just have to like you're constantly meeting people like, please, like me, please buy my products, please buy my services. And also then I was going on CNBC, the television network, quite a bit and Fox Business. And I always needed them to think of me and like me. And I was always trying to get other places to publish my articles. And and I got I got kind of. burnt out. Like, why am I spending so much energy? Because it takes a lot of energy. Why am I spending so much energy trying to get people to choose me? Like, who are they that I'm giving them all this power to choose me? And so I figured if I'm really going to be good at what I do, and I love the writing. I had been writing pretty much every day for like 20 years at that point. And like, since I was a kid. And if I'm really good at this, I should be able to do it on my own and build my own. People should read me regardless of whether some magazine is publishing me or whatever, particularly with the rise of social media. And so I did that. I just said, screw it. I am not going to try to be anywhere else anymore. I'm going to start with me. And so then I didn't have to care about the content. I didn't have to write like, oh, 10 stocks you should buy for Christmas or whatever, or whatever it is. And I just started writing. And then I actually downsized. I moved to a cheaper, I moved out of New York City. I moved to a cheaper area. This is, again, a time when I was rebuilding. I had built another business and gone broke, but I was trying to rebuild. And I figured, you know what? I'm just going to just focus on my writing and see what happens. And it was great. And like nobody had ever seen. I mean, right now, kind of what I call failure porn is like a common genre. But at the time, no one was really writing about their failures and nobody was really being vulnerable in the way I was, at least in, you know, kind of the call it the self-help area, an area I didn't consider myself being in, but other people did. And, you know, it just it just sort of and then I saw that my suddenly, you know, previously I've been writing about finance stuff. But suddenly when I was writing about this more personal, vulnerable stuff, my audience went up by a factor of 10 or 20. Like it was enormous. I went from, you know, let's say a few thousand followers on Twitter to 200,000 followers on Twitter. And it's just people were really responding to this and people really needed it. Like they needed to know that other people were having these experiences and you didn't have to hide all the time. Like when I was so ashamed the first time I went broke, like, oh, I'd failed in our society. But I wrote, but everybody has at some point or other. And I think people needed to hear that. So that was it. contributed to the popularity of what I was writing. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Well, I think around that time, everyone like social media was relatively new and everyone's trying to cultivate this public persona of perfection. And then when someone comes along and does the opposite, people are going to like take notice of that and, and want to see it, you know? So yeah, it's a lot more common now and that's probably thanks to people like yourself, but I don't know if this links or not, but in your interview with Tim Ferriss, I heard you say that. that you'd read a book called by Dennis Johnson, I think, called Jesus Son, or like over 300 times or something? Yeah. Sorry, go on. No, finish your question. I'm sorry. I was going to say, what impact did this book have on you? Like, why was it such an important book for you? Yeah. And it's an important question because first off, I just want to add, it's not a religious book. Okay. So nothing wrong with religious books. I've also read many religious books, but it was, it's a collection of short stories and it's... I would say the best collection of short stories ever written. And I am not the only one who says this. There's a book that came out a few years ago, The Writer's Bookshelf. And it takes like 100 writers and shows what books are on their bookshelf. And almost everybody had Jesus'Son. Like all the great writers had Jesus'Son on their bookshelf. And the thing is, when you want to get good at something, you have to study. the best. So there's a saying, you're the average of the five people you spend your time with. But that also applies, you're the average of the five people you virtually spend your time with. So what TV shows you watch, what videos you watch, what books you read, what artists you study, what tennis players you study, whatever it is you're trying to get good at. So Jesus Son was like the best writer ever. Dennis Johnson, who wrote Jesus Son, was like the best short story writer ever. I don't consider him the best novelist ever. but he was the best short story writer ever. And his stories. kind of reflected this idea that you can write, you don't have to make up complete fiction to write fiction. Like you could write about your life in a literary way. It doesn't have to be in this dry, you know, I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. My dad was a fireman. Like it doesn't have to be in this dry autobiographical way. You could write literary nonfiction. And I mean, his stories were fiction, but they were pretty much based on. on his life when he was a drug addict and having hard times. And so his book, I first read his book in 1994, which is I think the year it came out. And I actually even read the stories when they were just in literary journals before the book came out. But I still, to this day, I mean, just the other day, I mean, over this past weekend, I read The Largest of the Sea Maiden, which is his last book of his last collection of short stories. And I read that particular story again because I saw it mentioned in a TV show I was watching called Industry, which was a great show. And the writers referred to this short story. And I even wrote to them and I said, great job referencing, you know, the greatest short story writer ever that most people don't even know about. And they responded and said, thank you. But so I read that book to basically I learned something new every time. I read his stories, like just how he stylistically thinks about things. The world is almost dreamlike. And it's, you know, again, it's a way to it's a way I wanted to emulate. Like, can I write my own story in this literary fashion? And by literary, it doesn't mean boring. Like, oh, it's like Shakespeare or whatever. But literary means it's readable, like it's good writing. For sure. For sure. I need I'm going to get this book and definitely take a read. um james uh you seem to be i can't think of many more people that have reinvented themselves more times than you you know you were i think a software developer entrepreneur writer podcaster investor stand-up comedian i think you've been a bit of dj as well like there's been multiple iterations of james albacher and most people you know they pick a pick a field and then they stay in it and they don't really do this so you know have you thought much about What enables you to continuously reinvent yourself? Like, how are you able to do that? Whereas most people aren't, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. So whatever I get interested in, I usually get super, super passionate about. And that's sort of a nice way of saying it. Like, a negative way of saying it is I get addicted. Like I can't do anything else but this thing I am super passionate about. And I think sometimes that's a problem. But like it's not like addiction to substances. But for instance, for a five, six year period, I was obsessed with stand-up comedy. So all day long, I would watch and study the great comedians or I would be writing comedy. And then every night, one to two times a night, I would go on stage at a comedy club. you know, in the city or sometimes I traveled to other cities and I would perform. And I did this for like six years. And, you know, I could have maybe been starting new companies or, you know, you know, building some other career that makes money. And some would say that's what you should do. But, you know, I had done pretty well and I had started a business that was still running and I would contribute to it occasionally. But. All I could think about was stand-up comedy. And sometimes those things get, you get too addictive. But my whole goal was I just wanted to be the best at whatever I was interested in. Like my whole point is why be interested in anything if you can't be among the best? The problem though is if you don't stick to one thing for your whole life, you probably won't be the best. Because the person who will be the best is the person who did from the age of 5 to 50 do just one thing. But I would get in the top, let's say, 1% of anything I was interested in. And that's enough to be very impressive. But then we talked earlier about idea sex. When you combine the different things you're interested in, sometimes magic results. Or if you're building a career and people say, oh, what are you doing tonight? Oh, I'm going out to perform. stand-up comedy like I do every night and you're part of the whole subculture of stand-up comedians and they all know like that's kind of like a cool thing like people who don't do these things think it's a cool thing even though it's amazingly hard and painful and whatever Uh, so, so yeah, I've, I, again, for better or for worse, like right now, um, you know, when I was younger, I was obsessed with chess and I became a young, strong chess master, like one of the top in my age group. I was, I grew up in a New Jersey, which is a state in the United States. I grew up in New Jersey and I was the New Jersey junior champion and that, but that was a long time ago. But more recently I figured, you know what? I want to prove that as an older person, I can be just as good as when I was younger. So I became obsessed with doing this. And now I live in a different state. I live in Georgia. I'm the Georgia senior champion. I went from New Jersey junior champion, stopped playing for 30 years, and now I'm the Georgia senior champion. And I just become obsessed. And now, am I good? I mean, any great player will think I'm not good. You know, I'm not like the world champion or even... close or I'm not in the top 100 players in the world, but I'm in the top one half of 1%, say, out of, let's say, a billion people play the game. I would say I'm probably even better than that. But I never feel good about it because I'm not the best. So I keep working at it and I get obsessed. And the same thing when I was interested in investing and I wrote software and I wrote books about it and the whole thing. Or when I was interested in writing. read every book I wrote every single day and you know I become obsessed you seem to have an addition that you seem to have a high tolerance for pitting yourself in uncomfortable situations so for example whenever you were learning stand-up you would go to you went to the New York subway and just did it on the subway you know like that is that's pretty extreme yeah well I figured I'm starting you know again a lot of people like Dave Chappelle take him as an example let's say he's you know obviously in the top five of comedians he started when he was a little kid and how how am i going to catch up is the thinking to all these so i needed to like put myself in difficult situations to to basically you know you you build a sharp sword under fire and the higher the hot of the flame the better so so i had to put myself under a hot flame in in a comedy situation to get better. So the New York City subway at rush hour, it's crowded. There's all these people who had bad days and they just want to get home. They don't want to hear someone on the subway in between stops doing stand-up comedy jokes. And it had to be stand-up comedy style. I just couldn't tell like dad jokes or whatever. It had to be like the stand-up comedy style. And so from stop to stop, I would switch subway cars and then I would stop, start going again. And at first, I got on the subway with someone who was going to videotape it. And I told her, forget it. I can't do this. I'm too scared. But then I said, just put on the camera just in case. And then I started going and it was good. And then I don't think I did great. Like it's, you know, I was trying to train myself to come up with quick one-liners and to be able to handle a negative crowd. And, you know, so, but I did okay. And then it started making me think of an idea. Well, and this is the idea sex part. Well, think of a late night show, like at the time, like David Letterman or, you know, classically Johnny Carson or Jimmy Fallon, like The Tonight Show. And the format of every late night show is there's a stand up act. Then there's interview a celebrity. And then there's like a musical act. And so. I figured, well, what about if you put that, if you combine the late night show format with the subway? And I had just done kind of like the host monologue. And then I brought a friend on who had just published a best-selling book. And I interviewed him on the subway and we interacted with other people on the subway. And then I found somebody who was playing at one of the subway stops, just garbage cans. You know, he was playing them like drums. And I had him as the musical act. And I put all that together in like a half hour quote unquote show. I sent it to an agent because why not? He said, this is unsellable, but okay, I did it. If it had been sellable, that would have been a great thing. It was unsellable. So I tried and quote unquote failed, but it was an interesting experience. And that's the point. It's an interesting experience. And I wonder, you've also done things like, I'll list a few, you attempted to buy Greenland, you sold everything that you owned, you lived in Airbnbs for two years. And I just wonder, is... Is part of you... sort of pushing you into those situations or are you able to do these things because you know that worst case scenario it's going to lead to amazing stories that are going to be great material for your writing anyway so you you can't really lose in the long run like what do you think about that you know i i didn't think it at the time but yeah i figured all those things whether they were successes or failures did lead to good stories and material and you know life is a collection of stories so yes you want to be a good you know, loving person and care for the people around you and not be known as a bad person. And these are all kind of, you know, and you want to accomplish things in life, but also you kind of want to have lots of interesting experiences. Interesting to you. It doesn't have to be, I'm not going to be like the first man in space or whatever. It doesn't have to be like huge, interesting, but interesting enough for you that you could tell a story because those are fun and you'll have fun kind of creating the stories. And Uh, so sometimes even in like bad experiences, they do turn out to be really good stories later. Like for instance, uh, you know, like the Greenland thing. Uh, I remember one time, this was like when, when Donald Trump was president, he tweeted out that he wanted to buy Greenland. And I had never even thought about Greenland since I was a kid or whatever. And then the prime minister of Denmark, for some reason tweeted out, it's not for sale. And I was like, dumbfounded. I was like, first off, did the president of the United States just offer to buy a country on Twitter? Like, how do you even buy a country? And then the prime minister, what does Denmark have to do with Greenland? Why did the prime minister of Denmark respond? And it turns out Denmark actually owns Greenland. I didn't know that. And then did I just watch an entire negotiation for a country occur on Twitter? Like, it was this fascinating thing. So then I did some research. Turns out Greenland has after China, Greenland's the country with the most rare earth minerals and rare earth minerals are rare for a reason. There's not that much of them, but you need them to to power your electric grid, to power semiconductors and so on. And China is the biggest source. So Trump obviously was looking for someplace other than China. And Greenland is the main source other than China. And I started researching and it's a. Pretty serious issue. Like what happens if China cuts off the rest of the world from rare minerals? And then I looked into it. Apparently, Denmark sold off all the mineral rights to China in Greenland. And so it could be a little scary. And not only that, Greenland, Denmark, I don't know if it's because Denmark treats them poorly, but Greenland, if it was its own country, which apparently it isn't, it would have the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. Like everybody's an alcoholic and it's... They're depressed. And so I figured, oh, let's do something to help Greenland and not let any country control the rare earth minerals. So I started essentially a Kickstarter to crowdfund buying Greenland so we could all buy it. And I said, and like a Kickstarter style, I said, OK, if you donate $1,000, you could be a Duke of Greenland. If you donate $100, you could be an Earl. $10,000, we'll have a holiday named after you, and on and on. I had all these awards. But then I think it was Indiegogo I did it with, and they cut me off because they said, I guess I started raising money. I started raising thousands of dollars, but my goal was to raise $100 million. And Greenland said, look, we know you're kidding, and we don't want to eat the credit card fees when we have to return all the money. So they cut me off, but I learned a lot, and it was an interesting story, and it was a fun experience. That's incredible. That's really just how far you're able to take it. And by the way, you don't need money to do these experiences. Anybody can do these things. For sure. This maybe is a good time to bring up your philosophy around 10,000 experiments versus 10,000 hours. How can someone use this to improve at something? Say somebody wants to get better as a speaker, for example, how might they better go about it using 10,000 experiments versus 10,000 hours? Sure. That's a really good question and a good context, which is being a speaker. People are really afraid of public speaking and with good reason. Like if you think about it in evolutionary terms, you know, there were 40 people in a tribe. Your tribe would protect you, would feed you. And, you know, it was important to be in a tribe. But when you stand up in front of the tribe and make a speech, you might say something or you may make a fool of yourself and the tribe's going to. pick you out, and then you're going to be a dead person at some point. And So it's really scary to speak just from this evolutionary perspective. And, you know, so that's a good context. So with public speaking, there's so the idea of the 10,000 experiments, and it's really more like almost 100 experiments. Well, first off, the idea of 10,000 hours was this idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell that if you work 10,000 hours at anything, you'll be among the best in the world. And he used as an example, like violinists. So the difference between like a professional world-class violinist and a great, but not top tier violinist might be the top tier. The great one might have done 6,000 hours, but the real professional one who's the best in the world might have done 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. So for me as an older person, I'm not going to spend 10,000 hours or something. I don't have that much time left. And I'm not that old, but 10,000 hours is a lot. It's five years of 2,000 hours a year, or it's 10 years of 1,000. That's a lot of time. You could do it if you start at six years old, but not if you start at 40 years old or 50 years old. And so I figured, okay, well, experiments are a good way to learn things. I just described that one experiment with doing a Kickstarter to buy Greenland. I had never done a... Kickstarter campaign before or a crowdfunding campaign. So I learned about that. I learned about Greenland. Actually, I learned something new about writing because I wrote it up in the style of a Kickstarter campaign when I wrote the story about it. So I learned all these things just from one or two experiments. And same thing with doing the comedy on a subway. But with public speaking, there's lots of ways you can experiment. For one thing, stand-up comedy is a great way to get on a stage and make a room full of drunk strangers laugh. And you might not succeed, but if you do it a couple of times, you're going to be a better public speaker. Like comedians are the best public speakers because they're using their whole body. They're telling jokes. They're using their voice inflected in different ways. They're working with the crowd. They're moving around the stage. They're actually, they're doing things with the mic. There's lots of things that comedians, techniques that comedians use that public speakers don't normally use, but should because it makes you a better public speaker. And I would say like doing standup comedy has 100x my ability to do public speaking. Like I never have, I'm used to be incredibly scared to public speak and now I'm fearless at public speaking. But that's a good example of the type of experiment. Oh, you want to get better at public speaking? Try doing stand-up because you will get better at public speaking. Oh, try, you know, just going on a subway and giving a talk. Or, you know, think of other experiments to improve your public speaking. But again, you don't have to spend 10,000 hours public speaking. If you just do 10 or 50 or 30 of these types of experiments, you will be an incredible. public speaker. And by incredible, I mean in the top 1%, maybe even higher. That's so interesting. So it's like you're applying basically the same skill set, but just you're changing the context each time and changing the context is like each time it's a new experiment and that can accelerate your learning because you're stepping outside of the usual pathway. Is that fair to say? Right. And again, you're putting yourself in uncomfortable situations and you're borrowing hours from another skill. that you're learning to the skill of public speaking. So for instance, even being good at writing, you could borrow some of the, let's say you put 3,000 hours of your life into being a good writer. You could borrow some skills from writing because writing is about being a better communicator and you could apply that to public speaking. You could borrow hours from stand-up comedy or vice versa. You could borrow your hours from public speaking to be good at stand-up comedy and on and on. So for instance, I could borrow the hours I spent studying chess as a kid to be a better investor, because a lot of chess is about understanding risk and when you're putting yourself in a risky situation. And I would say 90% of investing involves understanding risk at a deep level. And, you know, and again, also being an entrepreneur, I could borrow hours from entrepreneurship for investing, like what makes a good business. oh, the CEO seems to be having some personal issues in his life. Well, I know from entrepreneurship that... That doesn't usually make that company very good. So, you know, you could take ideas from one area and apply it to another. And, you know, it's interesting. The Nobel Prize in chemistry was, so the Nobel Prize is supposed to signify this is a guy who's the best in the world at chemistry. Well, for the first time ever, a chemist did not win the prize this year. A software guy won the prize. He was Demis. I forget his last name. But anyway, the guy who made DeepMind, which was bought by Google, which is an AI company. They actually made AlphaZero, the world's best chess computer. But he also made a program called AlphaFold, which now is the best engine or the best of chemists or otherwise at protein folding, which is a complicated problem in chemistry. He's essentially solved it. So he borrowed his 10,000 hours from computer science. also from chess. He was a strong chess master from AI, applied it to chemistry and literally overnight became the recognized best chemist in the world, won the Nobel prize in chemistry. Amazing. Amazing. Are we sort of, this reminds me of that idea that an average idea in one industry is like a brilliant idea in another. So you're sort of borrowing an idea that's in one domain, placing in another domain. And because it's not been there before. It can just go exponential. Is this sort of the same idea? Yeah. Like, okay, a classic example is like, you know, the sanitizer lotion they give you on a plane when you go on an airplane, you know, you put it over your hands, it kind of evaporates right away and now your hands are clean of bacteria. Well, originally that was made to clean, it was invented to clean semiconductor chips, but... And the people making semiconductors didn't really need it. They had something already or whatever. It wasn't really useful. But then people started, the guy who invented it would just keep it on his desk and people would stop by and like wipe their hands with it. And so the company, I think it was 3M, some big company conglomerate, they realized, oh, perhaps this could be used to help people clean their hands. And it became the biggest hand cleaner on the planet. I think the same thing is true for... post-it notes uh i forgot what the original purpose for post-it notes were but uh there was no use case they couldn't really figure out this guy invested he invented this adhesive that was not really that sticky it wasn't like glue or cement and but nobody knew what to do with it so he just started but he started writing reminders to himself and putting on his computer screen during the day And other people, other employees started borrowing it. And soon the company realized, oh, this is what we should sell it for. And it became, you know, this worldwide hit. I think, and Andy Fraja as well, and that's when Talib talks about the technology used in fridges was like originally designed for missiles, you know, like right around. I didn't know that. I'll look that up. As he mentioned. So we're a few minutes left, James. I want to ask just a little bit about Choose Yourself. One of the main ideas from that book, the one that really stuck with me is. This idea that we should almost literally view ourselves as having, or imagine ourselves having four separate bodies, you know, your physical body, your emotional body, your spiritual body, and your mental or creative body. And this can be a very beneficial thing to do. Can we tell us about, about viewing ourselves this way and how you've used this to sort of improve your own quality of life and just, yeah. Yeah. This is very important because we always think, and this is obviously very important, like in order to succeed, you need to be. physically healthy because how are you going to start a company or how are you going to be great at work if you're constantly sick in bed? So obviously it's important to take care of yourself if you want to succeed. You have to sleep a certain number of hours a day. You have to eat well. You have to exercise. Those seem to be the three basic components of being physically healthy. But also it's almost as if we have three other bodies that need to be just as healthy. Of course, there's the physical body. But we also have an emotional body where, you know, if you have bad emotions, you feel it. Like if you're angry at someone, if you're angry at your spouse, you feel it all over your body and you can't function. You can't focus. You're just thinking too much about being angry. So you need to keep your emotional health good too. And creatively, you need to keep your creative or mental body healthy as well, which is why I encourage people to exercise the idea muscle. If you're not. able to come up with ideas then what good is being physically healthy uh other than the other obvious benefits, but you need to still to succeed. You need to be creatively healthy and think of unique ideas and so on. And you need to be spiritually healthy. You need to have like kind of a sense of awe and surrender about the world around you. You can't feel like you can control everything. And I view that as spirituality. And all these bodies sort of work together, like your physical health helps your emotional health and vice versa and helps your creative health and vice versa. So they all need to be kind of. It's almost like there's this blood that connects all the bodies together. And if any one part of this breaks down, you're going to have a quote unquote heart attack, like where, you know, the bodies fall apart and you can't succeed. So it's very important to think of, for me at least, to think of life in terms of these four bodies and keeping them all healthy. And often they're not. I often have to really work at this to keep, you know, oh, if I'm angry, it's easy to get angry at somebody or... be sad or disappointed or to forget to do the 10 ideas a day or whatever yeah i think it's so important i've recently got in the habit of like at the end of each day like opening open up a note on my phone and i'll just write down like i ask myself right what were the wins today what did i learn where did i fall short um maybe one thing different i'll try tomorrow and i'm gonna add now giving myself a score out of 10 on each of these four these four bodies, because then it'll mean that every day I'm going to be reminded, right, did I actually look after my emotional body, my physical body, my spiritual body and the mental body as well? I think it's, it's just so important to keep that mind going forward, you know? Yeah, I agree. I think it's, I think it is really important. And again, whenever I've stopped doing it for a little while, I usually go instantly broke. So it's really important for me to keep this up. For sure. Well, James, it's been an absolute pleasure. I just want to say thank you so much. Where would you recommend people to go after this conversation? To your website? What book would they start with? Choose Yourself? Or where would you send people? Yeah, I would say Choose Yourself is a good book. And then my most recent book is called Skip the Line. And I like those two books. I don't always like every one of my books, but these two books I really like. I've got a copy here. I definitely recommend the Skip the Line one as well. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Good. So yeah, James, I'll let you go. Thanks a million. Have a great weekend. And we'll talk soon. Yeah, you too. And I really appreciate it. Great questions. You're a great interviewer. And I hope if your audience ever wants to ask me questions or anything, you can ask me at J Altucher on Twitter. And yeah, thanks so much again for having me on. Thank you, James.

And I thought I was never going to have that feeling again. Like I thought I was going to have to kill myself. Okay, James, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me on the show.

It's a real pleasure. Okay. So let's just dive right in.

Can you tell me about the time when you made millions and then obviously you lost everything? What was it like internally just to go from having that kind of abundance and then just to have, I think you had something like $147 in your bank account within a few days. So...

What was that like? What was going through your mind whenever this was happening? I mean, no matter what kind of success you have, like whether you, when you work really hard at something and a lot of times it's for money, but sometimes it's for a career.

Sometimes it's fame. Sometimes it's to succeed in some hierarchy, whether that hierarchy is a corporation where you want to be the CEO or whether it's a... sport where you achieve a high rank or whatever, if you fall from grace, it just is the worst.

It's the worst feeling in the world when you lose all your money and you have, and you worked hard for it. Like, it's not like I, I had started off with zero and made millions by building up really hard to build up a company. Like it's, it's a hundred hours a week or more.

And you know, you're responsible for all these employees. You're responsible for payroll. When you're the quote unquote boss, all that means in a startup is that you work for everyone else.

You work for your employees. You work for your investors. You work for your customers.

Like you work for your family, like because you're trying to provide for them. There is never a free moment in your brain that isn't the potential to be filled with stress. And then you sell it. and you make a lot of money, and it's great. And then for me, I made some bad decisions and lost everything after making millions.

I did retire on it, and I thought I had retired, and I said, oh, I'll just start investing because I'm smart enough to make these millions. I'm smart enough to make tens of millions more. And then to lose it all, I went from 15 million to, like you say, $143.

And it feels so bad because not only has your net worth gone to zero, so everything you worked so hard for for years, it seems to you at that time, it's just you did it for nothing. But your self-worth is often tied up into your net worth. And I just felt like I was a zero, like everything was bad. I would walk around and I'd see people enjoying their lives and I couldn't even understand. what that feeling was like anymore.

And I thought I was never going to have that feeling again. Like I thought I was going to have to kill myself in order to, in order to survive. I thought I was going to have to kill myself.

And that doesn't make any sense, but nothing makes sense in your brain at that point. Like I had a life insurance policy where I thought I was going to take care of my, my kids were babies, so they wouldn't remember me and they would be able to survive. And I just.

that's how bad I felt. And it was like every day, there's no escape from it. There's no, no moment that will make you happy.

Wow. And at what point did you start thinking about rebuilding and what did, what did that process look like for you? Like, how did you take those first small steps to sort of climbing out of that hole? Well, I always, I always needed to rebuild in the sense that I had $143 in the bank at my worst point. And I always needed to rebuild because how was I going to pay the bills?

I had two babies and a wife and a mortgage. I, you know, when I had the money, I bought this like a humongous apartment in New York City. So it was crazy amount of expenses I had and I had no money.

Like I'm thinking about it now. Like, like my only other alternative was to tell my wife to take the kids, move in with her mom, and I would be homeless. And at some point, I don't know what would happen.

But so my only other alternative was to try to figure this out. And I was unemployable in the sense that for the past five or six years, I'd been on my own running, running a business and on my own. And I couldn't, I couldn't imagine, like nobody, I don't even know what kind of job I would have gone for. And so I had written some software to model the stock market. Like, so I made all my bad decisions involved bad.

financial investing decisions. So I wrote some software to figure out where I went wrong. Like, why was I so consistently a bad investor? And this was two decades ago, but I figured software would be kind of this, I could remove the emotion from investing and from trading. And what I would do is I had all this stock market data since 1946 and every tick of every stock movement.

And I'm just modeled. the stock market and essentially used kind of old-fashioned AI, this is again, two decades ago, to figure out what were significant patterns where you can make money over and over again that people didn't seem to realize. Like a very simple example might be, I'm just making this up, but if Microsoft went down four days in a row, maybe there was a 98% chance it would go up on the fifth day over the past 30 times that had occurred. And so my software was... you know, all night looking for patterns that might have occurred during the day before that were, that the AI was telling me, oh, here's a trade.

And then in the morning I would make a trade. Again, I had, I had like other people invested with me. So like I was investing a little bit of money and I would take profits or I take some of their profits and share their profits with them. And so I, and this was in 2002, it was like one of the worst bear markets ever. I mean, 2000. 2008 was a worse bear market, but there wasn't really worse bear markets than 2002, the year after 9-11 and all these wars and all this stuff.

And I was only going long, meaning I would only buy the market, even though the market was going straight down. And I needed to make essentially 100% a month on the money in order to survive. And this was a market that was going straight down.

But sometimes in markets like that. It never goes straight down in a straight line. There's always a lot of volatility.

It goes up, it goes down. People are scared. People are happy. And so the software was doing really well. It actually became the basis of my first book, which is a more financial-based book than some of my other books.

But the software worked, and I was making a lot of money every month. Not enough to rebuild any savings or well. There was just enough to pay my bills, but I needed to do that. every single month. I had to be up every single month in the worst market ever at that time to survive.

But this wasn't making me happy because this was desperation. I would make these trades and I was just desperately hoping they'd work out or else I was going to die is what I thought. And at some point, I would make these trades and then I would take a walk around.

the city because I just wanted to be away from the screen so I wouldn't be addicted to the screen. And I would take a walk around. And one time I passed this restaurant supply store and I'm like, oh, I don't know why I walked into it. I had no interest in restaurant supplies.

But I saw this box filled with waiter's pads and they were selling the whole box of waiter's pads for $10 for 100 waiter's pads. So like 10 cents a pad. And I bought it and... I started using these waiter's pads to basically write 10 ideas.

Like I went to the cafe the next morning because I never slept. I was up at like five in the morning and go to the cafe and I started just writing ideas. Oh, here's 10 ideas for trading systems.

Here's 10 ideas for books. Oh, here's a book idea. Here's 10 ideas for chapter titles. Oh, here's 10 ideas I'm going to write for, you know, this company as if I was the CEO of the company. And I just started writing these ideas.

And maybe the ideas were good or maybe the ideas were bad. But after like a couple of weeks, I noticed. I was actually happy for the first time in a couple of years. Like I was excited about these ideas, whether they were good or not.

And it kind of occurred to me over time, really, that having ideas is like a muscle. Like people say ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything. This is not true. Ideas are hard to come up with. Like you have to, if you don't exercise that muscle, it atrophies.

And execution ideas are a subset of ideas. So if you want to be good at execution. You have to exercise that idea muscle. So I realized I was exercising this muscle and it was giving me all sorts of ideas, not just trading ideas, but like magical things would start to happen when I started implementing some of these ideas.

And bit by bit, it took years, but that's how I kind of dug myself out of this pit and survived and built another business and sold that, but then went broke again, unfortunately. Well, I owe you a bit of a thank you, James, because as I mentioned before, that I read, I read Choose Yourself about a decade ago and I was, I had failed at two companies at this stage and I was looking for a job at a London based startup. They were called Fundzing. They were sort of like an Airbnb for experiences before Airbnb did experiences. And after I read Choose Yourself, I was like, why don't I send them 10 ideas?

Like I'll do the usual application process, but I'll send them 10 ideas as well for how you. how I could help improve their company, you know? So I sent it and got an interview, got the job.

And then because I took that job, that led to the business I'm currently running, which I've been going for over seven years now. So... Will Barron What's the business you're currently running? David Elikwu It's called The Weekend University. It's all about making psychology more accessible.

Will Barron Wow. Okay. And you make courses about psychology? David Elikwu Yeah, we do a combination of courses and summits. So we picked like a big topic, like say like addiction or attachment.

And we'll do like a summit where we'll interview like, say, 30 of the world's leading experts on that topic over the course of a year. And then we release this as a live event. And then we do a deeper dive course as well into that subject after the summit, if that makes sense.

Yeah. So yeah, it works, the 10 ideas. And from a psychological point of view, I'm just wondering, have you thought about why this might be so beneficial? Like, it seems that if you are... if you're exercising this idea muscle, you're sort of engaging your prefrontal cortex, like newer parts of the brain.

And it takes you out of this sort of rumination, like the sort of, you know, these like sort of useless loops that our brains get into. Have you thought much about that? Like why this might be so?

You know, I haven't, that's really interesting. Like, why do you think it engages the prefrontal cortex, which is also by the way, the part of the brain that is good at assessing risk. And that's why, like, you kind of have a you don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex until you're about 25 years old so that's why you see younger people often take much greater risks than older people and uh but so i'm just curious why you think it engages that part of the brain well i've interviewed a couple of a couple of people on addiction and these would be like these would sort of be the experts at helping people break addictions and what they do in a therapy session is When a client comes to therapy for addiction, they're usually like really deep in shame, right? Which engages these older parts of the brain, like more like the limbic system and all the rest. And if they can successfully get the client curious about what's going on, then apparently there's a link there with getting the prefrontal cortex activated.

And then that makes it easier to actually make changes because you're not in these sort of old habitual thought patterns. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.

And again, I've never thought about it in this context, like what part of the brain is being activated. It always seems to me, though, there is some part of the brain being activated because, again, like I take a look at my example, I was like really depressed and I could not function and I was really miserable. And then the only thing I changed in this period was I started writing these 10 ideas a day down. And suddenly I did get not only happier.

but more productive. Like I was able to focus on things again and basically get out of this huge slump I had been in and actually have confidence and think I could try things again. And so there must've been something going on in the brain that I was like activating, like some dormant, again, some muscle, and I call it the idea muscle, but that's just almost a metaphorical term.

But there was something that was dormant in the brain that I was suddenly activating again. And it also, I was able to. focus. It's like you sit down. And so I remember the very first idea list.

I had this idea for a book. Uh, and I just wrote at the top of the waiter's pad, you know, um, how to beat your friends and family at every game in the world. That was going to be the book.

And the idea was to come up with for every game, just very simple tricks, uh, of, of how to beat your friends and family. So like for Scrabble, for Monopoly, for checkers, for chess, for poker, just like simple techniques where that would put you in the top 5%, which is not that hard. you know, you know, let's say, let's say a hundred million people in the world play poker. I'm just talking about techniques that it doesn't make you a pro, but it makes you in the top 5 million of a hundred million.

And that's, that's good enough, obviously to beat 95% of the people, i.e. your friends and family. So, so, so I wrote down the, my, my, the first list was like all the games I wanted to, to, to, to put in the book. And then the next list was like, okay, for Scrabble. here's the 10 things.

If you know these things, you'll beat everybody you know at Scrabble. For poker, if you know, here are the 10 things, you'll, you know, so, so, and I was excited. And then I would, I would talk to friends of mine and they would get excited.

Like, oh, you know, you can make a whole series based on this. Like it could be like a franchise kind of thing. And, and that was just the first idea.

I never did the book. The point is not doing the book really, or doing the ideas. The point is exercising the idea muscle. That alone is, is worth it. But it was still exciting and fun.

And it took me out of this several year long obsession with getting my money back. And so I could just get a little bit of a break from that pain. And it was good.

So it's worth doing just because of the state of mind it leads to for the rest of the day. Because if you do this every day, it puts you into like a just a different frequency. You're just like, yes, that's a good way to put it higher level, you know, so. You can't really lose by doing this. You may have a lot of bad ideas and it's not about the ideas themselves.

It's about exercising the muscle and what that then leads to in other areas of your life. Yeah, you're going to have bad ideas. Like if you're doing 10 ideas a day, you can't have 3,650 good ideas a year. You're going to have one good idea a year or two. But the point is some of the ideas might be pretty good and there might be building blocks that lead to good ideas or help other ideas.

Like if you're at a job, And it's like, oh, 10 ways to improve this process at work. One of those things might contribute to your being a better employee and improving some process at work or whatever. And like, you know, again, like every day, it's not like I do it at the end of the day either.

I do it in the morning because like you say, and I, again, I haven't really thought about it before, but it does improve the rest of the day. Like once I check the box, okay, I've did my 10 ideas a day. Now I could start off and do the rest of the day. but my mind's already active.

It's already doing things. For sure. Can you tell us about idea sex? What is idea sex and how can people practice this as well? Yeah.

So over time, as you're exercising this idea muscle, you start to develop kind of tricks that are very interesting and you notice them in society, in real life too. And so one of these things I call idea sex, and it's this concept that let's say there's one good idea. in one area of life and then there's a good idea in another area of life nobody's ever combined these ideas before but sometimes combining them i call it idea sex will lead to even better ideas so i'll just give a very you know simple example let's say you love mexican food and you love sushi and you want to start a restaurant well maybe Mexican sushi would be an interesting thing.

Like, oh, here's a sushi-rito, like sushi combined with a burrito. And you could come up with 10 ideas that would be on the menu for a Mexican sushi place. And some examples in real life. Well, look, Airbnb is sort of like hotels combined or bed and breakfast combined with the internet. And Uber is like taxi cabs.

Combined with, you know, again, phones and using your real car. You know, there's lots of kinds of music. There's like, you know, rap mixed with.

Well, actually, the first big mainstream hip hop or rap song was when Run DMC took their rap style and combined it with Aerosmith's, you know, heavy metal style. to make walk this way. And like, there's so many like, or, or again, I'll use from the example of rap because rap is interesting because it, it it's this one medium where it actually encourages idea sex. Like it combines many different musical styles.

And like, so the Fugees I remember. They did this song in 1997 or 98, which was based on the Saturday Night Fever movie theme song by the Bee Gees with rap. And of course, it's a no brainer that that's going to be a hit. Like chances are of one things they hit and another things they hit. If you combine it, the results are hit.

Star Wars took George Lucas, took science fiction combined with, you know, the traditional Western. combine them together. He took all the tropes and combined them and made Star Wars. So you see this in almost every area of life where you can combine these things and you come up with really new, interesting ideas.

Well, like an example, I don't know if this is exactly relevant or not, but something that always stuck in my mind from what you did whenever you're promoting Choose Yourself is that you were one of the first people ever to accept payments by Bitcoin. Yeah. And that led to so many opportunities afterwards.

You want to tell us about that as well? Yeah. So in 2013, so I, so starting around 2010, I started writing all these articles and stories about things that had happened to me.

And at the time, nobody was doing this. Like people were horrified, like, you know, cause I was in the financial business and people were saying, how could you write, how could you be in the finance business and write about going broke so many times? Like nobody's going to ever. give you any opportunities ever again, which was completely untrue, it turned out.

But I didn't care. So for a while, like literally for like a long time, every single day, I was writing another article or story. Like I was just looking at my archives because I was looking for an article I'd wrote in 2011. And I saw in 2011, I wrote 258 published stories.

And they weren't like news articles or, you know. two paragraph things. They were like real stories about events that had happened to me. And I did this every single year. So, and the best of those kind of rewritten into a book form became this book, Choose Yourself.

And I wanted, I had used mainstream publishers many times. And in fact, my last book was from HarperCollins, a mainstream publisher, but I really wanted to do something. I wanted to combine mainstream publishing with self-publishing. So usually when you think of self-publishing, you think of, oh. you know, it's going to look really bad.

There's no designer. You print it up at some, you know, paper store. And now you sell these books out of the back of your car. I wanted to, I wanted to professionally self-publish.

So I hired like, and it wasn't so expensive. I hired a designer to design the cover, another designer for interior design, a real professional editor. And I work with real professional marketing people.

And One of the things I did with Choose Yourself was I had this idea. A month before I was going to release it, I built a store, an e-commerce store that accepted Bitcoin only. And the only item I sold in that store was my book, Choose Yourself, a month in advance.

You can get it a month in advance and you can get a PDF of it. And I sold it for one tenth of a Bitcoin. Bitcoin at the time was $61. So it was roughly $6.

You know. Now that would be $6,800, but, you know, one-tenth of a Bitcoin. But I sold each PDF for one-tenth of a Bitcoin.

And then I remember CNBC actually had me on TV and, you know, we talked about Bitcoin. I said, Bitcoin's kind of like this choose-yourself currency. And they said, come on, did you really just do this as a marketing gimmick?

And I said, well, I'm on national TV right now. So basically it worked. And again, like that was a result of, okay, here's 10 ideas for how to market my book.

And that was one of the ideas. That's a brilliant example. You mentioned there about, you know, all these articles. You wrote so many articles out in 2011, over 300. And I've heard you say that vulnerability buys freedom and you never publish something. unless you're scared to do so.

So first question here, James, is why, at what point did you decide, okay, I'm just going to be as open and honest as possible and just sort of turn myself inside out almost? What was the impetus for that? Why did you decide, okay, I'm just going to share everything?

I think at some point, like in 2009, 2010, it was kind of... you know, at some point I realized I was kind of building all my career always, whether no matter what I was doing, I was trying to always just get people to like me. So like, Oh, you know, when you're when you're an entrepreneur and you're a salesman, as you know, you just have to like you're constantly meeting people like, please, like me, please buy my products, please buy my services.

And also then I was going on CNBC, the television network, quite a bit and Fox Business. And I always needed them to think of me and like me. And I was always trying to get other places to publish my articles.

And and I got I got kind of. burnt out. Like, why am I spending so much energy?

Because it takes a lot of energy. Why am I spending so much energy trying to get people to choose me? Like, who are they that I'm giving them all this power to choose me? And so I figured if I'm really going to be good at what I do, and I love the writing. I had been writing pretty much every day for like 20 years at that point.

And like, since I was a kid. And if I'm really good at this, I should be able to do it on my own and build my own. People should read me regardless of whether some magazine is publishing me or whatever, particularly with the rise of social media. And so I did that.

I just said, screw it. I am not going to try to be anywhere else anymore. I'm going to start with me.

And so then I didn't have to care about the content. I didn't have to write like, oh, 10 stocks you should buy for Christmas or whatever, or whatever it is. And I just started writing.

And then I actually downsized. I moved to a cheaper, I moved out of New York City. I moved to a cheaper area. This is, again, a time when I was rebuilding. I had built another business and gone broke, but I was trying to rebuild.

And I figured, you know what? I'm just going to just focus on my writing and see what happens. And it was great. And like nobody had ever seen.

I mean, right now, kind of what I call failure porn is like a common genre. But at the time, no one was really writing about their failures and nobody was really being vulnerable in the way I was, at least in, you know, kind of the call it the self-help area, an area I didn't consider myself being in, but other people did. And, you know, it just it just sort of and then I saw that my suddenly, you know, previously I've been writing about finance stuff.

But suddenly when I was writing about this more personal, vulnerable stuff, my audience went up by a factor of 10 or 20. Like it was enormous. I went from, you know, let's say a few thousand followers on Twitter to 200,000 followers on Twitter. And it's just people were really responding to this and people really needed it.

Like they needed to know that other people were having these experiences and you didn't have to hide all the time. Like when I was so ashamed the first time I went broke, like, oh, I'd failed in our society. But I wrote, but everybody has at some point or other.

And I think people needed to hear that. So that was it. contributed to the popularity of what I was writing. Amazing.

Amazing. Yeah. Well, I think around that time, everyone like social media was relatively new and everyone's trying to cultivate this public persona of perfection.

And then when someone comes along and does the opposite, people are going to like take notice of that and, and want to see it, you know? So yeah, it's a lot more common now and that's probably thanks to people like yourself, but I don't know if this links or not, but in your interview with Tim Ferriss, I heard you say that. that you'd read a book called by Dennis Johnson, I think, called Jesus Son, or like over 300 times or something?

Yeah. Sorry, go on. No, finish your question.

I'm sorry. I was going to say, what impact did this book have on you? Like, why was it such an important book for you?

Yeah. And it's an important question because first off, I just want to add, it's not a religious book. Okay. So nothing wrong with religious books. I've also read many religious books, but it was, it's a collection of short stories and it's...

I would say the best collection of short stories ever written. And I am not the only one who says this. There's a book that came out a few years ago, The Writer's Bookshelf.

And it takes like 100 writers and shows what books are on their bookshelf. And almost everybody had Jesus'Son. Like all the great writers had Jesus'Son on their bookshelf.

And the thing is, when you want to get good at something, you have to study. the best. So there's a saying, you're the average of the five people you spend your time with.

But that also applies, you're the average of the five people you virtually spend your time with. So what TV shows you watch, what videos you watch, what books you read, what artists you study, what tennis players you study, whatever it is you're trying to get good at. So Jesus Son was like the best writer ever.

Dennis Johnson, who wrote Jesus Son, was like the best short story writer ever. I don't consider him the best novelist ever. but he was the best short story writer ever. And his stories.

kind of reflected this idea that you can write, you don't have to make up complete fiction to write fiction. Like you could write about your life in a literary way. It doesn't have to be in this dry, you know, I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. My dad was a fireman. Like it doesn't have to be in this dry autobiographical way.

You could write literary nonfiction. And I mean, his stories were fiction, but they were pretty much based on. on his life when he was a drug addict and having hard times. And so his book, I first read his book in 1994, which is I think the year it came out. And I actually even read the stories when they were just in literary journals before the book came out.

But I still, to this day, I mean, just the other day, I mean, over this past weekend, I read The Largest of the Sea Maiden, which is his last book of his last collection of short stories. And I read that particular story again because I saw it mentioned in a TV show I was watching called Industry, which was a great show. And the writers referred to this short story. And I even wrote to them and I said, great job referencing, you know, the greatest short story writer ever that most people don't even know about. And they responded and said, thank you.

But so I read that book to basically I learned something new every time. I read his stories, like just how he stylistically thinks about things. The world is almost dreamlike. And it's, you know, again, it's a way to it's a way I wanted to emulate. Like, can I write my own story in this literary fashion?

And by literary, it doesn't mean boring. Like, oh, it's like Shakespeare or whatever. But literary means it's readable, like it's good writing. For sure. For sure.

I need I'm going to get this book and definitely take a read. um james uh you seem to be i can't think of many more people that have reinvented themselves more times than you you know you were i think a software developer entrepreneur writer podcaster investor stand-up comedian i think you've been a bit of dj as well like there's been multiple iterations of james albacher and most people you know they pick a pick a field and then they stay in it and they don't really do this so you know have you thought much about What enables you to continuously reinvent yourself? Like, how are you able to do that? Whereas most people aren't, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

So whatever I get interested in, I usually get super, super passionate about. And that's sort of a nice way of saying it. Like, a negative way of saying it is I get addicted.

Like I can't do anything else but this thing I am super passionate about. And I think sometimes that's a problem. But like it's not like addiction to substances. But for instance, for a five, six year period, I was obsessed with stand-up comedy.

So all day long, I would watch and study the great comedians or I would be writing comedy. And then every night, one to two times a night, I would go on stage at a comedy club. you know, in the city or sometimes I traveled to other cities and I would perform.

And I did this for like six years. And, you know, I could have maybe been starting new companies or, you know, you know, building some other career that makes money. And some would say that's what you should do.

But, you know, I had done pretty well and I had started a business that was still running and I would contribute to it occasionally. But. All I could think about was stand-up comedy. And sometimes those things get, you get too addictive. But my whole goal was I just wanted to be the best at whatever I was interested in.

Like my whole point is why be interested in anything if you can't be among the best? The problem though is if you don't stick to one thing for your whole life, you probably won't be the best. Because the person who will be the best is the person who did from the age of 5 to 50 do just one thing. But I would get in the top, let's say, 1% of anything I was interested in. And that's enough to be very impressive.

But then we talked earlier about idea sex. When you combine the different things you're interested in, sometimes magic results. Or if you're building a career and people say, oh, what are you doing tonight? Oh, I'm going out to perform. stand-up comedy like I do every night and you're part of the whole subculture of stand-up comedians and they all know like that's kind of like a cool thing like people who don't do these things think it's a cool thing even though it's amazingly hard and painful and whatever Uh, so, so yeah, I've, I, again, for better or for worse, like right now, um, you know, when I was younger, I was obsessed with chess and I became a young, strong chess master, like one of the top in my age group.

I was, I grew up in a New Jersey, which is a state in the United States. I grew up in New Jersey and I was the New Jersey junior champion and that, but that was a long time ago. But more recently I figured, you know what?

I want to prove that as an older person, I can be just as good as when I was younger. So I became obsessed with doing this. And now I live in a different state.

I live in Georgia. I'm the Georgia senior champion. I went from New Jersey junior champion, stopped playing for 30 years, and now I'm the Georgia senior champion.

And I just become obsessed. And now, am I good? I mean, any great player will think I'm not good. You know, I'm not like the world champion or even...

close or I'm not in the top 100 players in the world, but I'm in the top one half of 1%, say, out of, let's say, a billion people play the game. I would say I'm probably even better than that. But I never feel good about it because I'm not the best.

So I keep working at it and I get obsessed. And the same thing when I was interested in investing and I wrote software and I wrote books about it and the whole thing. Or when I was interested in writing. read every book I wrote every single day and you know I become obsessed you seem to have an addition that you seem to have a high tolerance for pitting yourself in uncomfortable situations so for example whenever you were learning stand-up you would go to you went to the New York subway and just did it on the subway you know like that is that's pretty extreme yeah well I figured I'm starting you know again a lot of people like Dave Chappelle take him as an example let's say he's you know obviously in the top five of comedians he started when he was a little kid and how how am i going to catch up is the thinking to all these so i needed to like put myself in difficult situations to to basically you know you you build a sharp sword under fire and the higher the hot of the flame the better so so i had to put myself under a hot flame in in a comedy situation to get better.

So the New York City subway at rush hour, it's crowded. There's all these people who had bad days and they just want to get home. They don't want to hear someone on the subway in between stops doing stand-up comedy jokes.

And it had to be stand-up comedy style. I just couldn't tell like dad jokes or whatever. It had to be like the stand-up comedy style. And so from stop to stop, I would switch subway cars and then I would stop, start going again. And at first, I got on the subway with someone who was going to videotape it.

And I told her, forget it. I can't do this. I'm too scared.

But then I said, just put on the camera just in case. And then I started going and it was good. And then I don't think I did great. Like it's, you know, I was trying to train myself to come up with quick one-liners and to be able to handle a negative crowd. And, you know, so, but I did okay.

And then it started making me think of an idea. Well, and this is the idea sex part. Well, think of a late night show, like at the time, like David Letterman or, you know, classically Johnny Carson or Jimmy Fallon, like The Tonight Show.

And the format of every late night show is there's a stand up act. Then there's interview a celebrity. And then there's like a musical act. And so.

I figured, well, what about if you put that, if you combine the late night show format with the subway? And I had just done kind of like the host monologue. And then I brought a friend on who had just published a best-selling book.

And I interviewed him on the subway and we interacted with other people on the subway. And then I found somebody who was playing at one of the subway stops, just garbage cans. You know, he was playing them like drums.

And I had him as the musical act. And I put all that together in like a half hour quote unquote show. I sent it to an agent because why not?

He said, this is unsellable, but okay, I did it. If it had been sellable, that would have been a great thing. It was unsellable. So I tried and quote unquote failed, but it was an interesting experience. And that's the point.

It's an interesting experience. And I wonder, you've also done things like, I'll list a few, you attempted to buy Greenland, you sold everything that you owned, you lived in Airbnbs for two years. And I just wonder, is... Is part of you...

sort of pushing you into those situations or are you able to do these things because you know that worst case scenario it's going to lead to amazing stories that are going to be great material for your writing anyway so you you can't really lose in the long run like what do you think about that you know i i didn't think it at the time but yeah i figured all those things whether they were successes or failures did lead to good stories and material and you know life is a collection of stories so yes you want to be a good you know, loving person and care for the people around you and not be known as a bad person. And these are all kind of, you know, and you want to accomplish things in life, but also you kind of want to have lots of interesting experiences. Interesting to you.

It doesn't have to be, I'm not going to be like the first man in space or whatever. It doesn't have to be like huge, interesting, but interesting enough for you that you could tell a story because those are fun and you'll have fun kind of creating the stories. And Uh, so sometimes even in like bad experiences, they do turn out to be really good stories later.

Like for instance, uh, you know, like the Greenland thing. Uh, I remember one time, this was like when, when Donald Trump was president, he tweeted out that he wanted to buy Greenland. And I had never even thought about Greenland since I was a kid or whatever. And then the prime minister of Denmark, for some reason tweeted out, it's not for sale.

And I was like, dumbfounded. I was like, first off, did the president of the United States just offer to buy a country on Twitter? Like, how do you even buy a country? And then the prime minister, what does Denmark have to do with Greenland?

Why did the prime minister of Denmark respond? And it turns out Denmark actually owns Greenland. I didn't know that. And then did I just watch an entire negotiation for a country occur on Twitter? Like, it was this fascinating thing.

So then I did some research. Turns out Greenland has after China, Greenland's the country with the most rare earth minerals and rare earth minerals are rare for a reason. There's not that much of them, but you need them to to power your electric grid, to power semiconductors and so on. And China is the biggest source. So Trump obviously was looking for someplace other than China.

And Greenland is the main source other than China. And I started researching and it's a. Pretty serious issue. Like what happens if China cuts off the rest of the world from rare minerals? And then I looked into it.

Apparently, Denmark sold off all the mineral rights to China in Greenland. And so it could be a little scary. And not only that, Greenland, Denmark, I don't know if it's because Denmark treats them poorly, but Greenland, if it was its own country, which apparently it isn't, it would have the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. Like everybody's an alcoholic and it's... They're depressed.

And so I figured, oh, let's do something to help Greenland and not let any country control the rare earth minerals. So I started essentially a Kickstarter to crowdfund buying Greenland so we could all buy it. And I said, and like a Kickstarter style, I said, OK, if you donate $1,000, you could be a Duke of Greenland.

If you donate $100, you could be an Earl. $10,000, we'll have a holiday named after you, and on and on. I had all these awards.

But then I think it was Indiegogo I did it with, and they cut me off because they said, I guess I started raising money. I started raising thousands of dollars, but my goal was to raise $100 million. And Greenland said, look, we know you're kidding, and we don't want to eat the credit card fees when we have to return all the money.

So they cut me off, but I learned a lot, and it was an interesting story, and it was a fun experience. That's incredible. That's really just how far you're able to take it. And by the way, you don't need money to do these experiences. Anybody can do these things.

For sure. This maybe is a good time to bring up your philosophy around 10,000 experiments versus 10,000 hours. How can someone use this to improve at something? Say somebody wants to get better as a speaker, for example, how might they better go about it using 10,000 experiments versus 10,000 hours?

Sure. That's a really good question and a good context, which is being a speaker. People are really afraid of public speaking and with good reason. Like if you think about it in evolutionary terms, you know, there were 40 people in a tribe.

Your tribe would protect you, would feed you. And, you know, it was important to be in a tribe. But when you stand up in front of the tribe and make a speech, you might say something or you may make a fool of yourself and the tribe's going to. pick you out, and then you're going to be a dead person at some point.

And So it's really scary to speak just from this evolutionary perspective. And, you know, so that's a good context. So with public speaking, there's so the idea of the 10,000 experiments, and it's really more like almost 100 experiments. Well, first off, the idea of 10,000 hours was this idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell that if you work 10,000 hours at anything, you'll be among the best in the world. And he used as an example, like violinists.

So the difference between like a professional world-class violinist and a great, but not top tier violinist might be the top tier. The great one might have done 6,000 hours, but the real professional one who's the best in the world might have done 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. So for me as an older person, I'm not going to spend 10,000 hours or something. I don't have that much time left. And I'm not that old, but 10,000 hours is a lot.

It's five years of 2,000 hours a year, or it's 10 years of 1,000. That's a lot of time. You could do it if you start at six years old, but not if you start at 40 years old or 50 years old. And so I figured, okay, well, experiments are a good way to learn things. I just described that one experiment with doing a Kickstarter to buy Greenland.

I had never done a... Kickstarter campaign before or a crowdfunding campaign. So I learned about that. I learned about Greenland. Actually, I learned something new about writing because I wrote it up in the style of a Kickstarter campaign when I wrote the story about it.

So I learned all these things just from one or two experiments. And same thing with doing the comedy on a subway. But with public speaking, there's lots of ways you can experiment. For one thing, stand-up comedy is a great way to get on a stage and make a room full of drunk strangers laugh. And you might not succeed, but if you do it a couple of times, you're going to be a better public speaker.

Like comedians are the best public speakers because they're using their whole body. They're telling jokes. They're using their voice inflected in different ways.

They're working with the crowd. They're moving around the stage. They're actually, they're doing things with the mic. There's lots of things that comedians, techniques that comedians use that public speakers don't normally use, but should because it makes you a better public speaker. And I would say like doing standup comedy has 100x my ability to do public speaking.

Like I never have, I'm used to be incredibly scared to public speak and now I'm fearless at public speaking. But that's a good example of the type of experiment. Oh, you want to get better at public speaking? Try doing stand-up because you will get better at public speaking.

Oh, try, you know, just going on a subway and giving a talk. Or, you know, think of other experiments to improve your public speaking. But again, you don't have to spend 10,000 hours public speaking.

If you just do 10 or 50 or 30 of these types of experiments, you will be an incredible. public speaker. And by incredible, I mean in the top 1%, maybe even higher. That's so interesting. So it's like you're applying basically the same skill set, but just you're changing the context each time and changing the context is like each time it's a new experiment and that can accelerate your learning because you're stepping outside of the usual pathway.

Is that fair to say? Right. And again, you're putting yourself in uncomfortable situations and you're borrowing hours from another skill.

that you're learning to the skill of public speaking. So for instance, even being good at writing, you could borrow some of the, let's say you put 3,000 hours of your life into being a good writer. You could borrow some skills from writing because writing is about being a better communicator and you could apply that to public speaking. You could borrow hours from stand-up comedy or vice versa.

You could borrow your hours from public speaking to be good at stand-up comedy and on and on. So for instance, I could borrow the hours I spent studying chess as a kid to be a better investor, because a lot of chess is about understanding risk and when you're putting yourself in a risky situation. And I would say 90% of investing involves understanding risk at a deep level.

And, you know, and again, also being an entrepreneur, I could borrow hours from entrepreneurship for investing, like what makes a good business. oh, the CEO seems to be having some personal issues in his life. Well, I know from entrepreneurship that...

That doesn't usually make that company very good. So, you know, you could take ideas from one area and apply it to another. And, you know, it's interesting.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was, so the Nobel Prize is supposed to signify this is a guy who's the best in the world at chemistry. Well, for the first time ever, a chemist did not win the prize this year. A software guy won the prize.

He was Demis. I forget his last name. But anyway, the guy who made DeepMind, which was bought by Google, which is an AI company. They actually made AlphaZero, the world's best chess computer. But he also made a program called AlphaFold, which now is the best engine or the best of chemists or otherwise at protein folding, which is a complicated problem in chemistry.

He's essentially solved it. So he borrowed his 10,000 hours from computer science. also from chess. He was a strong chess master from AI, applied it to chemistry and literally overnight became the recognized best chemist in the world, won the Nobel prize in chemistry. Amazing.

Amazing. Are we sort of, this reminds me of that idea that an average idea in one industry is like a brilliant idea in another. So you're sort of borrowing an idea that's in one domain, placing in another domain.

And because it's not been there before. It can just go exponential. Is this sort of the same idea? Yeah.

Like, okay, a classic example is like, you know, the sanitizer lotion they give you on a plane when you go on an airplane, you know, you put it over your hands, it kind of evaporates right away and now your hands are clean of bacteria. Well, originally that was made to clean, it was invented to clean semiconductor chips, but... And the people making semiconductors didn't really need it. They had something already or whatever. It wasn't really useful.

But then people started, the guy who invented it would just keep it on his desk and people would stop by and like wipe their hands with it. And so the company, I think it was 3M, some big company conglomerate, they realized, oh, perhaps this could be used to help people clean their hands. And it became the biggest hand cleaner on the planet. I think the same thing is true for...

post-it notes uh i forgot what the original purpose for post-it notes were but uh there was no use case they couldn't really figure out this guy invested he invented this adhesive that was not really that sticky it wasn't like glue or cement and but nobody knew what to do with it so he just started but he started writing reminders to himself and putting on his computer screen during the day And other people, other employees started borrowing it. And soon the company realized, oh, this is what we should sell it for. And it became, you know, this worldwide hit. I think, and Andy Fraja as well, and that's when Talib talks about the technology used in fridges was like originally designed for missiles, you know, like right around.

I didn't know that. I'll look that up. As he mentioned.

So we're a few minutes left, James. I want to ask just a little bit about Choose Yourself. One of the main ideas from that book, the one that really stuck with me is.

This idea that we should almost literally view ourselves as having, or imagine ourselves having four separate bodies, you know, your physical body, your emotional body, your spiritual body, and your mental or creative body. And this can be a very beneficial thing to do. Can we tell us about, about viewing ourselves this way and how you've used this to sort of improve your own quality of life and just, yeah. Yeah. This is very important because we always think, and this is obviously very important, like in order to succeed, you need to be.

physically healthy because how are you going to start a company or how are you going to be great at work if you're constantly sick in bed? So obviously it's important to take care of yourself if you want to succeed. You have to sleep a certain number of hours a day.

You have to eat well. You have to exercise. Those seem to be the three basic components of being physically healthy.

But also it's almost as if we have three other bodies that need to be just as healthy. Of course, there's the physical body. But we also have an emotional body where, you know, if you have bad emotions, you feel it.

Like if you're angry at someone, if you're angry at your spouse, you feel it all over your body and you can't function. You can't focus. You're just thinking too much about being angry. So you need to keep your emotional health good too. And creatively, you need to keep your creative or mental body healthy as well, which is why I encourage people to exercise the idea muscle.

If you're not. able to come up with ideas then what good is being physically healthy uh other than the other obvious benefits, but you need to still to succeed. You need to be creatively healthy and think of unique ideas and so on. And you need to be spiritually healthy.

You need to have like kind of a sense of awe and surrender about the world around you. You can't feel like you can control everything. And I view that as spirituality. And all these bodies sort of work together, like your physical health helps your emotional health and vice versa and helps your creative health and vice versa. So they all need to be kind of.

It's almost like there's this blood that connects all the bodies together. And if any one part of this breaks down, you're going to have a quote unquote heart attack, like where, you know, the bodies fall apart and you can't succeed. So it's very important to think of, for me at least, to think of life in terms of these four bodies and keeping them all healthy.

And often they're not. I often have to really work at this to keep, you know, oh, if I'm angry, it's easy to get angry at somebody or... be sad or disappointed or to forget to do the 10 ideas a day or whatever yeah i think it's so important i've recently got in the habit of like at the end of each day like opening open up a note on my phone and i'll just write down like i ask myself right what were the wins today what did i learn where did i fall short um maybe one thing different i'll try tomorrow and i'm gonna add now giving myself a score out of 10 on each of these four these four bodies, because then it'll mean that every day I'm going to be reminded, right, did I actually look after my emotional body, my physical body, my spiritual body and the mental body as well?

I think it's, it's just so important to keep that mind going forward, you know? Yeah, I agree. I think it's, I think it is really important.

And again, whenever I've stopped doing it for a little while, I usually go instantly broke. So it's really important for me to keep this up. For sure.

Well, James, it's been an absolute pleasure. I just want to say thank you so much. Where would you recommend people to go after this conversation?

To your website? What book would they start with? Choose Yourself? Or where would you send people?

Yeah, I would say Choose Yourself is a good book. And then my most recent book is called Skip the Line. And I like those two books.

I don't always like every one of my books, but these two books I really like. I've got a copy here. I definitely recommend the Skip the Line one as well. Oh, yeah. Thank you.

Good. So yeah, James, I'll let you go. Thanks a million.

Have a great weekend. And we'll talk soon. Yeah, you too. And I really appreciate it.

Great questions. You're a great interviewer. And I hope if your audience ever wants to ask me questions or anything, you can ask me at J Altucher on Twitter.

And yeah, thanks so much again for having me on. Thank you, James.

Transcript for:James Altucher: Journey of Reinvention

Transcript for:
James Altucher: Journey of Reinvention