This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average Host. This is the James altucher show.
Today on the James altucher show. Look, we're in a rapidly changing world where we're going to be compelled to have to reinvent ourselves. We're living longer Etc. And you don't want to just have to switch gears and figure out a new career later in life and start at the bottom like the skip the line buff that you have coming up like and I think it's interesting because it's about it's about this very
thing. Yeah, and you went through this in your mid-40s you left.
Profession and kind of started you were you did start new professions and a lot of people are going through that but they always think well, I'm already 45, how am I gonna learn to be the best or the top 1% of some field so I can make a living at this but also I think knowing being aware of what you're interested in doing knowing when your heart wants to do something when your heart doesn't want to do something I think is really
important. There's something about where naive
at a meets an audacious dream and then some steps are taken that that's how anything amazing is created. Well, there's so
many layers of you can't do this involved in any creative act because if people weren't saying Rich you can't do this then a thousands of other people probably would have done it by now. So it's it's kind of finding where people are saying you can't do this, but when you ask yourself why there's no real reason might as well. Try it, right?
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Thanks.
I'm always jealous of Rich role because he's
basically my age but he's like a super athlete the guy runs like Ultra marathons and
every Hawaiian
island for five days in a row eats healthy. He's a super vegan and he's such a nice guy. So we did a joint podcast together. It was partially is podcast partially my podcast I talked about my book think like a billionaire and some of the things that I've learned from interviewing so many billionaires
Pakistan has really good questions about that. I talked about the ready fire aim strategy for instance and several other
strategies, but then I talked about my new love which is the
book that I have just finished coming out next march called skip the line and the idea there is how you could change
passions change interests
at any point in your life. Everybody will say no you can't do that, but I talked in my book and then on this podcast about some of the
Techniques I've used and other people I know of used for skipping the line. So you quickly can become among the best of the world and even monetize your new interest. I was so happy to introduce this topic with my good friend Rich for all here's the interview.
It's nice to have interesting people come to your house. And I think that they my theory is that they Infuse this place with their energy and there's a there's a certain like kind of permanence to that that I feel like with every guest that comes like this place becomes better.
I like that and also I
think just having people in your home. It makes them relax a little bit. I
think it makes them relax and I think it makes them see view you as it makes it easier for
This to be a conversation because I'm in your home. I'm not just sitting back waiting for you to interview me like a reporter because this is your home. How long have you lived
here since we built the house 2003
2003. So you were still doing the lawyer
ringing? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I lawyer - I mean I was slowly kind of weaning myself off of the law up until 2012 the last couple of years. I wasn't doing very much of it. But yeah, I was I was I was a lawyer
here for the first several years and you commute all the way into
la
No, I mean at that point I had opted out of the big corporate law firm life. And then I had a variety of different iterations. Like I was a solo practitioner and then I had a couple partners for a while and then I had a different partner. I didn't office in Beverly Hills for a while. I had an office in Santa Monica and then I just worked out of the house on and off as well. So but also, you know in those iterations like I didn't really have a boss so I had more flexibility so it wasn't like the 9:00 to 5:00.
Of kamiya, but there are people that live around here that that commute downtown every day. Like I don't know how they do that because we live pretty far out
there. How far away is downtown from here.
We it depends it's all about traffic as you know, it can be two hours or it can be 45 minutes depending but our eldest daughter. She's a sophomore in high school. She goes to a high school that's east of downtown now and the commute is just too onerous. So we have an apartment that we run in downtown and my wife and I split the week staying
in there with her and we're home schooling the other one
good for you. I think that's yeah
the way both of them were have been home schooled on and off and I know you have lots of ideas and thoughts about education specifically college and all of that. I think we've talked about that
before. Yeah, although I'm just curious as a side like probably the main Peak question you asked about this is the socialization because obviously homeschooling she's going to learn more from you than in some crappy high school, but in terms of friends and socialization, does she get that? Yeah,
I mean that's
Something that comes up all the time and that that's something I worry about the least because our house is like it's like a functioning Studio. There's just people here all the time like all different kinds of interesting people. So in terms of like social stimulus, like that's the least of my worries II do get concerned occasionally about you know, basically pure academics.
I want to go right now I'ma tell you
remember from not high school. I know it is. It's basically just my the programming of my upbringing but
Kicks off and creates resistance around it.
Like I always ask people. Okay, I've even asked us to people who like majored in college in like European history and I say, okay. When was Charlene born? And this is the most this is the guy who United Europe or whatever is the first great king of Europe and probably 95% know and by the way, we've studied it has been in text books every year since like sixth grade and if you majored in European history, you should definitely know it but 90
Most I was almost a hundred percent don't get it right within 500 years,
right? And I don't think definitely could not answer. I don't
even really remember right now. And I've asked I've even written about in every acid Millions, but I think it was around 750 for give or take people say 1,400 1,300. They won't know. Yeah, and and I'm like, okay. Well, what else could you have we learned in school every single year. There's nothing else. I took French for five years. I can't say anything other than bender and I can't even count. I can't even count to ten and I took it for five years including in
college.
Right, what we do need to do though is reconfigure the priorities of Education around learning how to learn and learning how to make decisions and learning how to interact with people like life skills that transcend pure memorization. I mean you were looking at Shane paris's book here on sitting on the table. He was in here the other day and his whole thing about mental models was grown was born out of this realization that nobody had ever taught him about
The methodology of making good decisions like it's just that's there's no course in business school or in college or in high school about that and yet that's something that all of us need to do a zillion times every single
day. Yeah, not not only make decisions but avoid the biases that are like almost biologically built into our brains to prevent us from making good decisions, you know and have from an evolutionary point of view. There was a reason for it like if you heard if you were walking by a bush and you here
this rustling you would start running because for good reason maybe there's only a 1% chance of lion and a 99.99% chance. It's just wind through the bushes, but you can't take the chance. So you just run but we end up making we're staying at a screen all day now and we're getting those same instincts. And so we're making decisions based on those segment. There's no lion and in the computer, but like if a stock goes down a little bit and you're looking at the stock market or if someone sends you an email, you don't like you get that same.
Like I'm gonna just kill somebody or run and and you don't know that these are just biases that have been there for a million
years. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's certainly true and I've been victim to that many times Well, we all are I can't help it. Yeah, like
something in your body or mind is reacting to something in a visceral way. And so if you lean into that there usually is some creative output that you could produce so I remember one time
I'm this is a crazy little experiment. I did I wanted to play around with what our formats to write an article. So everybody just rights and posted on LinkedIn or their blog and they write a little, you know, ten reasons to do this or whatever. And so I wanted to come up with I've been playing around for 20 years different formats of writing. So I said I want to do something I never did before and Donald Trump had just tweeted. I'm going to buy Greenland, right and I'm thinking to myself that's really weird.
Like I didn't even know you could buy a country. And so I figured well. Okay, let's that something about this feels weird, of course and then and then the president of Denmark or I don't know the leader prime minister of Denmark he tweets back. It's not for sale. And this is like the weirdest auction I've ever seen on the planet like the present United States like wants to buy this massive piece of land and I don't even know Denmark owned Greenland and he's like it's not for sale. So that also is a weird comment like
Why did
he buy the ultimate troll when Trump tweeted that picture of one of his hotels like did you see that? Oh, yeah, I did amazingly treated. Like I definitely won't do this and it was a picture of like a Trump Tower like on a on a Barren like Greenland
landscape. That's so funny that he they did that and so I'm thinking but I didn't even see that which would have definitely set me off but just these two world leaders like bantering in this way like this about, you know, people live there, you know, it's just
Each piece of lamb is all these natural resources, where what how to Denmark end up owning Greenland's if I'm like Erik the Red a thousand years ago, like what is going on here? And so I started to research it and I thought okay, there's some weird things going on with Greenland that ain't no about so I learned I learned a lot about Greenland and then instead of just writing an article. I had never done a Kickstarter before so I decided to do a Kickstarter which so I said, okay. I'm going to raise a hundred million dollars so I could buy Greenland and I wrote All and instead of writing an article. I wrote just
All the reasons why I want to buy Greenland why people should let me buy it as opposed to Trump or some other country and and then I had to you know with kicks or you have to put all the rewards like so I said, okay $50 you could be a citizen $100. I'll make you an Earl thousand dollars. You could be a Duke and I get carving out all this like acreage for people and and and I was able to list though all the reasons why I thought this was interesting like there's a lot all these Rare Earth minerals and there's a company called Greenland natural resources, which
Actually a hundred percent owned by China. Yeah. So this is all again. Another weird China now is entering the picture and there's all these weird things. I didn't know. I didn't know Kickstarter and and and so this article quote unquote that I had now published on Kickstarter versus a normal place with start to get shared everywhere. And so that was interesting for me and then Kickstarter shut it down and so they shut it down because I'm obviously people started donating money right and kick starter and then go up on me the same.
Since they shut me down because I'm obviously not going to raise a hundred million. So they and their on they have to pay all the charge backs to the credit card company so it could be a big money loser for them. So they just shut it down, but then I had a second story, which is I was just shut down by Kickstarter and GoFundMe. And so the whole thing is here's a little experiment and I gained a huge amount from it without any cost to me. So I learned all this stuff about Greenland I learned about kicks. I never done a Kickstarter before so suddenly now I knew how to do a Kickstarter I spend some
I'm studying best crowdfunding practices and I learned about Kickstarter and and then I learned this new format. I could write articles in which was weird. And then I had a second story on top of it, which is that they censored me and here's what happened. So just that small impulse allowed me to experiment in ways that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise and learn a whole bunch of things that now I can do a Kickstarter or now. I can speak intelligently about buying Greenland or whatever and it's super funny. Yeah, it's funny. It's like
right wait what?
Like first of all, you know can a country by another country yes or no can an individual by a country and what's interesting is that you got shut down not on the merits right what you were attempting to do but on kind of a side technicality, which was probably motivated just by extreme discomfort, right? But what was going on and they're them trying to figure out like we got to find a way somehow to shut this down. Yeah
people were like sending money in like they were like wiring money and and so
sheer audacity of the whole
Yeah, it's not dissimilar from and I know you've talked about this as well Richard Branson saying saying give me you know going to Boeing and saying give me an airplane. Yeah. No, that's a great idea. So ridiculous that they would do that. But there's something about where naivete meets audace, you know an audacious, you know dream and then some steps are taken that that's how anything amazing is
created. Well to there's so many layers of you can't
Do this involved in any creative act because if they're if they're if people weren't telling if people weren't saying Rich you can't do this then thousands of other people probably would have done it by now. So it's it's kind of finding where people are saying you can't do this. But when you ask yourself why there's no real reason might as well. Try it. So like with this there's no reason why I couldn't start a Kickstarter to raise a hundred million dollars of I Greenland and I learn something and you know all the times like
Say oh, well, you know you can start a podcast if you ever done interviews before or radio show like leave it to the professionals. No, I think I can do it. Like why can't I do it and you know, I'll tell you another just quick experiments not as not as interesting as Richard Branson Richard Branson is really an interesting example because this is a 27 year old guy who was a magazine publisher and had no experience with anything relating to Airlines British Airways had a monopoly
appellee in England on Airlines Heathrow only dealt with British Airways and Richard Branson didn't have money and he simply calls up Boeing and asked to borrow a plane they give it to him. I mean the details I'm skipping over the details. They just lend him a plane for a year. He throws like yeah, you could use this one Landing Strip. We don't really use that much just same with JFK and suddenly has a plane going back and forth. Like you know that every I'm sure it every step of the way people were saying to him. Are you
Insane and but what does it hurt to ask and then of course, there's subtleties their skills to asking and how did he ask in all these things that he used skills learned from being a music magazine publisher. But still it's this combination of skills with audacity with you know, like why can't I and allows you to go forward on so many different different things,
right? I think both those examples Greenland and the Richard Branson example are a luster Dove of
Of both of these books, they'll the book that you have out. Now think like a billionaire in the book that you have coming out next year called skip the line like there are there are lessons in both of those examples that could be pulled from both or either of those
books. Oh, yeah, absolutely because let's say well, let me ask you when you were starting to run in marathons and then Ultra marathons and Ironman things and you were in your mid-40s. I bet you there were a lot of people saying to you.
Rich maybe you should just stick with a 6 K or
whatever plenty of that plenty of that I but I look at it as sort of the the the the frog in the warm water that's coming to a boil slowly like there is an incremental like sort of compounding path that you can take towards towards like an athletic goal. That's different from I mean, I guess I did skip the line in that I didn't do all that little stuff and I went right to like ultra distance and didn't pay my dues or didn't didn't take that additional, right?
And that
let's not forget. You didn't start with five k's and
10ks. What's an athlete like I can I mean look I can minimize it. But yeah, I guess for somebody not steeped in this world. It does sound like a little insane and
ridiculous. It was insane. Rich like you were you weren't an athlete then right? No, I had I had a past as an athlete right and Ice wall
but logically, yeah, like rationally on paper like it didn't make
sense. And so and and yet. Look what happens you you ran.
No, I don't know the exact the ultra iron whatever on every island of Hawaii, you know one day at a time. You do these that you did these incredible Feats. I'm sure many people every step of the way kept telling you can't but that's what put you on the other side where you suddenly if you go past enough of you can't do this then suddenly, you're the only one doing it. And so you were the only one in the world who had the the kind of resources and set of experiences instead of talents that you had where you were running and all these races, but you're also you know,
No, you going towards this vegan lifestyle you had the experience of being a lawyer. So you were able to you know, you had a better capability of writing about all these experience than most people would see were able to combine them all into being the only ritual out there doing these events books podcasts you were there's no one who can
compete. Yeah. Well, I think it's an example of having all of these skills in a variety of disciplines that I tried over the years that weren't necessarily matched up.
With with like my ultimate talents and certainly not my my passion or a or a sense of purpose that when they finally found the right Outlet at all, like congealed to create, you know, an amazing result in the same way that you know, somebody was to say to you like you don't have the credentials to be a podcast host. But many years ago. You did your 3:00 a.m. Show you learn how to talk to people you learn how to create something that's entertaining you are doing stand-up comment like you've done and you've been
writing even all of these other areas like all contribute to your ability to sit behind a microphone and be engaging and be entertaining and be curious all these skills that you've developed over the course of a lifetime. I mean, I would say similarly I took I took a million depositions as a lawyer. I learned how to ask questions and I think that my the my true skill set as a podcaster was developed through sitting in thousands and thousands of AA meetings listening to people tell their stories and learning how to
Tell my own story that was my training ground for being a public speaker and being a podcast host. You learn how to be empathetic you learn how to listen you develop this is this great capacity for compassion for The Human Condition that I think lends itself towards creating a safe and and interesting environment to explore those very themes with another person sitting across from
you. Yeah, I think I think that's so interesting because I think that does come across like your compassion for your gas comes across so much in Europe.
Pockets I think because of your experiences and you know, I always wonder about this idea that vulnerability like the kind of experience in a a the kind of experience in or one should experience in writing and maybe all forms of art vulnerability sort of buys Freedom like When You're vulnerable when you are able to admit to what can go wrong what has gone wrong with you in the past the mistakes you've made now, you're free, like nobody can say well you
Say this you've done this and I yeah, I said that I'm an idiot a lot of the time Bring it on and you're free. You don't have to deal with people saying well Rich. You can't talk about health you had this in this happen to you when your 20s? All right. Yeah read my book. It's in it already. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so you're free from from all that stuff in the and the more vulnerable like how can people you know attack that like can't say well now
You're not allowed to write about this because you experience there's no there's no rules. And and yeah, I'm just being authentic and that allows me to be as creative as I want in this area. I'm creative even about my mistakes.
Well, your specific strain of authentic vulnerability was really a Tipping Point in your creative career. Like when you finally made this decision that you were going to be honest and write about it write about your life and your experiences in a very transparent way. I'm sure there's a lot of fear that preceded that but when you
Mustered up the courage to do that. That's really when things change for
you. Oh, yeah completely and to the point that now I don't even like if I'm writing something I don't publish it unless I'm afraid of what people are going to think of me and I don't try to say something that's going to I just asked myself at the end right before I hit publish. Is this am I really saying something new and unique here because I don't want to say something that everyone else has said or am I saying something where I'm really afraid o know what it is.
What are XY & Z going to think of me? What are these people gonna think of me? What are my friends going to think of me? What are my readers going to think of me? So I I always have to double check myself because if you're not afraid of what you're creating there's a chance then that okay, everybody else has done it because they weren't afraid either and so there's got to be some resistance somehow you get over like even something I wrote recently. I was legitimately afraid. Well is this going to shed a new light on everything I've written for the past 10 years because I'm admitting to this.
Other thing and I was I was nervous incorrectly. So but that's okay. That's that's that's how you learn is getting over that on every time. Yeah,
when I wrote I think I probably told you this previously, but when I wrote Finding Ultra like I really had to get into the mindset of writing in my private Journal that no one was ever going to read like I had to get comfortable communicating things about my life that I'm ashamed of and that I'm embarrassed about and I remember
Were when I sent the manuscript to my editor at the publisher, I looked at my wife and I just I said, I hope I'm making the right decision. Like this could be the worst decision I've ever made but I knew intuitively that the value of the book would be directly correlated to the extent to which I was willing to be vulnerable because why do it otherwise, you know, and I think you know my book Finding Ultra is it's an addiction recovery Memoir. It's
Like this Sports story and it's also kind of like a health and wellness primer. But but ultimately it could be categorized as a sports Memoir and like I hate Sports Memoirs because they're all they're usually written by athletes in the Twilight of their career and their intended to kind of create a halo effect and and perhaps buy them a couple years in the spotlight and that's why they're not good because they're inherently less than honest and I've never won a race. It's not like I went to the Olympics or
Anything like that? Like why should anyone care what I have to say about this. The only reason that this the only way that this is going to be compelling is if I you know take my specific experiences and try to connect with something more Universal about the human condition and that can only come through, you know, a profound level of
honesty. Yeah, and that and that happened you created something very unique which was this sort of combination of kind of a sobriety Memoir health and wellness athletic Memoir + reinvention.
So you're in your 40s time when people think well that my knees are starting to her. Maybe I shouldn't run marathons anymore. There's a lot of people are thinking like there's of slowing down and you were literally speeding up at that point and I think you gave permission to for people who were reading it say. Oh, yeah. He stopped being a lawyer to do this. He stopped. You know, he he became sober and then this started having you went vegan this started happening. He's in his 40s and he's doing all these athletic competitions. It's sort of like you
You gave permission not only for other people to be equally vulnerable and I'm sure you got lots of messages like man. I was in the same situation as you and so on and then but you also gave people permission to hey I could if he could do it I could run a marathon or do something incredible when I'm 45 that I never thought I could do it before and I think that's something like I'm curious now like when you're thinking that that was a very pivotal story for you, right and it's an iconic story. Like I'm I was you were you were saying essentially I was down and out.
Then this happened and then I became a superhero. So this is like it is Iconic story. Do you feel do you ever feel like tied to that story? Like you have to keep repeating it or find a new story to ever give her grapple with the hold that story now has over you versus what this hold you originally had on that story. Yeah hundred percent and
I've worked really hard to kind of transcend that a little bit. Certainly. I think I think when the book came out, it was sort of characterized as a book about running which is
It isn't it's not about becoming an ultra marathon or it's very much a Choose Yourself story. You know, it's about Lee it's about the inherent power that we all have within ourselves to you know, basically shift the trajectory of our life, even if we find ourselves in our 40s or in our later years that that inherent capacity lives within all of us to tap into, you know, a more deeper reservoir of human potential in whatever way you know feels right to you.
And I think it took a long time for that message to kind of percolate out of what was considered to be a running book. But then yeah, I felt I wouldn't say trapped. I think that's too strong of a word but you know this sense of being like Oh, you're the vegan Ultra athlete like yeah, that's something that I did but it's only one aspect of who I am and the podcast very much is about it's not about me. It's about my guess. It's about it's about the next chapter.
Or if the if the book was going to have you know an epilogue like okay now what like I leverage some tools to grow and manifested this thing that I talked about in this book, but that growth continues that's not the end of the story. I want to continue to grow if I could make these changes what other areas in my life. Am I currently blind to so let's go on a journey to explore that with the smartest most interesting people that I can find and that has nothing to do with my story and everything about
No the wisdom that's available on the world.
And and so now you've interviewed hundreds of really amazing. Guess a lot of them kind of athletic but not all them. You know, you're a lot is about Wellness, but again, not not all of it. It's all people who have captivated you are interested you for various reasons, and I'm only ask you this so I'm debating this. So I've also interviewed hundreds and hundreds of my heroes and you know authors who are passing through
Through the city so I get to interview them and so on and and I've interviewed many people have just always looked up to and I'm starting to wonder. Okay after 500 of those maybe sometimes I want to just say what I think about things rather than just always interviewing people. And and so I'm kind of going forth on that of mixing that up a little not completely but just mixing it up. So it's not, you know, there's two million interview podcasts out there. Now when I and we were just talking about this earlier when we were in 2014.
There was like a hundred interview pockets and now there's literally to mine. I'm not even exaggerating it and okay, and we've also interviewed everybody. And so now we have an interview the whole planet but we've interviewed a lot of people so people start repeating things or saying similar things and then but I'm sure your audience there listening to you for a reason and maybe they want to start hearing more of what you have to say about a topic and I wonder if you've ever debated doing kind of more solo
stuff. Yeah. I mean a couple thoughts first of all,
Both of us have been doing this for a while. I started mine in late 2012 you've done more episodes than me, but I started a little bit ahead of ya. There's been a lot of overlap in our guests. We've been on similar Journeys indeed when we started it was not a competitive environment. Both our shows went right to the top and kind of stayed there and in the intervening years. This medium has been has been adopted in a very mainstream way. So the ecosystem has matured tremendously around us we
Not lucky enough to grab a little piece of real estate and hold on to it. But you know, I certainly want wouldn't want to be somebody starting an interview based podcast now, I think it would be very very difficult to do that. So I'm extremely grateful to be in the position that I'm in and I'm sure you feel the same way. But you know, here we are and I'm interested in your thoughts to I'm going to throw this back to you. Like what is the State of Union and you know with this medium and as somebody
One who thinks about things in a counter intuitive way and with a different lens like you know, what is the future of this and you know, I'll continue to answer your question and allow you to answer that when I'm done. I think that you know, I had come all Roddick on over here yesterday your good friend and we were talking and we were talking about your show and I said to come all I got I tune into James like James has lots of interesting people on a show, but I want to hear James like I'm I'm fascinated by your your like your lens your perspective on the world.
And you're the reason that I tuned in so I think that that is a smart and appropriate pivot for you to start to have more Standalone episodes with just your Reflections in your thoughts in my own case. I have thought about that the hardest part of this whole podcast thing for me is doing the introductions like when I'm alone talking into a microphone. I'm so up in my head and it feels so unnatural. So the idea that I would sit down and just deliver a monologue, you know spontaneously from Whole cloth.
Even if I had an outline, that's like that scares me and I feel like that is a skill that I haven't yet honed and perhaps that's a reason to attempt it
or there's a way to experiment in the sense that let's say you have just someone sitting here who's listening and occasionally maybe instead of like an interview. It's let's say 50/50 but let's say in this case. You need to foil. Yeah foil. You you need someone who you're just going to throw things against it. If something doesn't quite stick they'll inform you of it.
Yeah, like a like a more than like a you know, a co-host but somebody who you know can like match your wits and push you to deliver a monologue.
Yeah, like let's say those mean go ahead. So well, let's say there's an issue that you know triggered that emotional impulse for you this week. So something happened that bothered you and you just wanted to end and you want to talk about it, but not necessarily the issue but even more globally like what does this mean for either?
Of the world or people or what did I learn from this or the economy or whatever and you just start ranting on it? Yeah, and
I do have a little bit of a of an insecurity around it. I think here's an example. So last year we did our first like live podcast event. We booked this big theater and we sold it out as like 1,200 seats. That's great. And the idea was to do a live podcast and but also produce a show. That was very you know, that kind of transcended.
Podcast format to create an entertaining experience for people. I had my son's play music and then enqueue perform some live poetry. And then I did a live podcast with Paul Hawken who's like this legendary environmentalist and I conducted that podcast very much as if he was sitting across from me right now. Like I kind of maintained that format and after the show was over I basically went you know out in the hallway and just talk to people for as long as they
Wanted to talk to me and I was there for hours and hours and hours and I realize in retrospect though these people like I think they're coming to see Paul Hawken, you know, and and I realized like oh there there they are coming to see me which makes me uncomfortable. Like I doesn't feel like I because I have profound impostor syndrome. Like I can't imagine why anyone would want to come and see me but so the growth for me is in is in owning that and and and and living up to that on some
Of all that that you know, I have had certain life experiences that have value and that there is something interesting about sharing, you know, my
perspective. Yeah, or what if you even went on Twitter before hand and he said listen, I'm going to try this solo episode thing, but give me some fuel ask me a bunch of questions and then you pick the four or five that you like the best and can even just do a 20-minute episode or where or attach a story from your life to each question long with the answer and or your answer and that's an
Sewed
right? Yeah, I think I'll probably try that. I think I'm I wouldn't say I'm in a rut but I had we have like a routine now. I know yeah, I know how it goes and it's working and you're somebody who's coming in as you know, like this disruptive Force who's like always, you know, got the waiter pads and you're writing down the 10 ideas every day and you're like trying to buy Greenland and you're doing all that crazy stuff and what I love and appreciate it appreciate appreciate about it isn't just the kind of courage to do it.
It's your relationship with the outcome. I feel is very healthy. Like you're not it's not about whether it works or not. You're just doing it
right because here's what I always think is that something is going to work some outcome will exist that I like but it doesn't have to be the outcome of whatever it is. I'm doing that day. So I'm doing something let's say today or tomorrow or the next day. I'm doing something to try something new or try and experiment or
or write something eventually the outcome might be bad like for instance this Greenland Kickstarter thing. And again, this is a silly example, but that was essentially a failure. I didn't raise a hundred million dollars to buy Greenland Kickstarter. Shut me down and it was fast enough. It didn't really get as widely spread as I as a successful outcome would have been but it was interesting. I learned something. I learned a whole bunch of things and then you move on because you know, Lex has been missing story. Yeah. I'm amazing story and now I have knowledge. Okay, I here's how
A Kickstarter. I want to try something new and so now I can do the next thing which might be just as crazy or not and the outcome may be good maybe bad eventually they'll be out. Some outcomes will be better than others. But whether the outcome is bad or a good learning from each thing.
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You can analyze this as the 10,000 experiments role we might talk about the 10,000 hour rule. You're like that's nonsense. Let's focus on 10,000 experiments because Dad yeah
because I so the 10,000 hour rule which you know was developed by great guy Professor Anders Ericsson. He basically determined if you devote yourself to 10,000 hours of what he calls deliver practice at any field, you'll be among the best in the world at that field and this was written about by Malcolm Gladwell.
the book outliers and it kind of became a popular phrase after that I just couldn't wrap my head around it though because I feel like I've Gotten Good at a bunch of different things and I don't think I spent 10,000 hours at them and I couldn't and for some things I couldn't figure out what does he mean by 10,000 hours like I understand with let's say you're you know doing a golf putt I got understand practicing that for 10,000 hours and we'll get better at golf putting but for something
I like writing what does it mean to spend 10,000 hours writing like this there's there's so many nuances in a creative field in this it's not like repetitive it's not like I can get a coat after I write a sentence I can get a coach say well that sentence could have been better so I didn't really and I would write to him and he's always very smart he was always very friendly to respond and I read all these different theories like can I borrow Ours from this other activity so I was trying to get good at stand-up comedy I started this it's a random thing
So I was got passionate about it about five years ago started going up on stage and I was trying to figure out can I borrow from my 10,000 hours public speaking and some hours from my writing and some hours from just don't know being funny or how does it work? And so I
would transfer ability. Yeah, these these skills involved in a variety of disciplines. Can you aggregate them to come up with your 10,000 hours? Yeah, or
at least give me some head start and he and he kept running about well, what's the metric you're judging?
Yourself with and there's really no metric. Like how do you determine if something for instance is good writing or not? Is it spoke sales? No, is it if your favorite Professor likes it know it's hard for Creative efforts. It's hard to have a metric of success for many for sales ability for business ability. There's so many like other factors like luck environment the people you're dealing with there's it's hard to to measure your success with these 10,000 hours and it was confusing talking to me. So then I figured well.
Maybe there are and then the other thing that concerned me was well what if you take training methods now and go back to the 1920s? So for instance, if someone took people who coaches who train for marathons and took those same techniques back to the 1920s when coaching techniques for so we're not as advanced. Would it be that a hundred hours to be the best in the world, you know the hours change depending on how advanced the field is. So I more things kept coming.
Up that I didn't really understand and that's when I started thinking of a another model completely to measure my own success and then to increase to accelerate my own learning and different fields. And so I was very excited about that because I basically took me two or three years to be a good solid professional investor took me two years to achieve a level I wanted and let's say a game like chess which is normally a hard skill or a computer programming which is a hard skill and then with
With stand-up comedy. Also, I didn't you know, I'm I was 48 years old at the time. I'm 50 to now I didn't want to go 10,000 hours or 20 years to get good at something. That doesn't I don't want to be on stage and I'm 68 years old trying to make a bunch of strangers laugh. Like if it feels silly to me, I just wanted to get good at it. Now. I wanted to literally skip the line everybody kept telling me don't think you can skip the line like we've all watched
our stand-up comedy like they're very, you know, respect your elders and that's very much, you know, you got to grind and and
Pay your dues. Yeah, that's what you'll tell me median will be like, you gotta go up there and bomb a thousand times, you know, and and just keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it and in 10 years, you'll be good. Yeah 10 the whole best case is what they would say and here you are like you start basically telling jokes on the subway, right? And yeah, so I just know you're headlining. Hey, I'm not
what is the time period it's basically about five years, but like four years since I started taking it super seriously where I would go up.
Two or three times a week and more recently, you know up to 10 times a week. So but yeah, I had to construct I had to really be very analytical about it and I would deconstruct every comedians axle. I would understand what they were doing and then I would explain it back to them and they're like, huh? I never thought like that which is fine. Like they were they have their process but then I start constructing experiments I can do to basically accelerate my learning and I found every experiment really changed.
To the way I would do comedy. So I would start really a people would see me from one month to the next are like boy. When did you start doing X Y or Z and I like after this experiment I did were I saw these other things weren't working. Uh-huh. And sometimes the experiments are very simple like between jokes. What if you just lean back against the wall and look up at the ceiling for three seconds or for for a half a second like so just even an experiment like that because there's this feeling on stage that you have to spit everything out as
The as possible or you know, you mentioned one experiment I did I went on this so I wanted to tighten up my one liner. So I went on the subway and did stand-up comedy on a crowded subway cars where nobody wants to hear. You tell jokes. Nobody likes you. Nobody is in in the best case. I can't even work
towards getting a laugh is very hot,
right. They're not they didn't just pay a cover charge to see a comedian. They just want to get home like you're bothering them at that point and they're not drinking.
So they want to drink some of them might be right but some of them might be and most of them want to drink and then this person just gets on the car and starts telling jokes straight at them and it was it's very difficult. But
that did you get some laughs
so I did yeah oddly I would get on and I would say like the one that got the most laughs is like I was AI is this was this the six-and-a-half stopped like is this is this the train to Hogwarts and so kids would laugh at that and then
I did another one. Hey, I order an Uber pool, but they sent me this up like so that got some laughs. Uh-huh. Those are like the main two things about
laughs you have to be so comfortable with your vulnerability that but I wasn't it's like I was with a friend of mine
and this person brought on a video camera just so I could study it later and I got on and I looked around I'm like forget it. I we just wasted our time like you can just put the camera away and I was like, and then I said on second thought just turn it off.
It on and let's just wait a second. So my friend turned on the video camera and then I just went off so just right I wasn't I just went without thinking and and you know, sometimes people will laugh and sometimes people were like, you know boo like get out of here. So but that
happened you gotta be okay with either one.
Yeah, you gotta be okay with either
one. I mean that's the difference between true vulnerability and what I see a lot of now, which is I call it performative vulnerability. It's sort of like now
Cool to be vulnerable all of a sudden and you see a lot of people using it in a very I feel like disingenuous way like, oh like When You're vulnerable online, that's how you get people interested in what you're doing. So I'm going to do this and it's like this weird like fake vulnerability. Yeah, and I see
that it's almost like you can't I if you pick up a reason self-help book any almost any reason stuff out book and I'm not going to throw the whole industry under the bus but a lot of reasons help her.
It looks you can't even there the author always starts off like well, I was in my darkest moment and then XYZ happened and I started writing in my gratitude journal and whatever and I let everything became better and it's like that's like a bad in an even in Silicon Valley. It's like a badge of honor like yeah. I failed at my first startup and blah blah blah and then now now I'm ready and yeah, I agree. I think it's a way to kind of almost by it's almost to transactional the vulnerability.
Right. Yeah transactional I think is a good word and hand in hand with that. I get I'm sure you do too. Like I get all the galleys in the mail now. Yeah, when you host a podcast like suddenly books just arrived at your house all the time. Like I get like six books a week in the mail and generally they'll be you know, the upcoming self-help books, right? So I have so many self-help books being delivered on the regular here that it's made me very cynical about. Yeah, you know, I just look at this one.
I'm like, they're all they all in and I can't possibly read all of them. But maybe you can but the kind of page through them and I'm like, they just feel like different flavors of the same thing and it's made me like less interested in all of that.
Yeah. That's why I think we'll look at you know, for instance binding Ultra or in my upcoming, you know, Skip the line, I think about this. What are forget about all self-help. What are my real stories for?
Or For Worse and what did I learn from them? And what can I extrapolate the extrapolation is what gives it the self-help categorization like? Okay, I did this this and this so that's a formula but I always say I'm not giving advice this is what work for me specifically, but maybe it's broad enough. It could work for others and I always want to make sure it's it's just not like there's a Not only was there a self-help genre, but they all kind of recommend the same thing and and you get the sense. They're recommending it without real.
Perience or the recommending it so they can start getting speaking gigs talking about it because you can make a lot of money talking more, you know motivating companies. And so I always try to make my make sure I'm saying something really unique like this this 10,000, you know thinking about learning and the 10,000 hour rule and how I could succeed like you went through this in your mid-40s. You left a profession and kind of started you were you did start new professions and that's a lot of people are going through that but they always think well, I'm already
45 how am I gonna learn to be the best or the top 1% of some field so people so I can make a living at this because you need to be in the top one percent roughly two to make a living and to feed your family and we're going through it just personally and as an economy and so really grappling with that and how I challenged myself to learn different things and how I failed at many things in the along the way I had to think well, what's what's happening did it and that's where I went from the 10,000 hour.
Rule 2 mi can I borrow ours or is there like shortcuts or cheats or what's actually happening? You have to really think inside what happened to me that I can bring out as a story and I feel like you did that too with with Finding Ultra was your unique path to saying hey at 45, you could still be a top, you know, a world-class athlete and do these things and get over these issues and change careers and on and on and on.
Yeah, but I think my book was really just a
Worry, where as you look at these things that have happened in your life and you look at other successful people and you're trying to extrapolate the themes and the lessons and then figure out a way to communicate a path forward through a lens or you know a path that perhaps has never really been fully articulated like the skip the line book that you have coming up. Like I haven't read it yet, but you've told me a little bit about it and I think it's interesting because it's about
Out it's about this very thing of like look. We're in a rapidly changing world where we're going to be compelled to have to reinvent ourselves. We're living longer Etc. And you don't want to just have to switch gears and figure out a new career later in life and start at the bottom. You're somebody who has had success in a variety of disciplines without really having to do that without putting in 10,000 hours and somehow found your way into that like top keyer that top 1% of these disciplines.
what was it what was the differentiator here and what can be learned from that experience that could be helpful to other people
yeah and I think and level there's other things too that I've massively failed at so you sort of learn along the way I better restrict my failure so I don't lose everything on this failure so you have to also construct ways to get better at something we're not risking your entire life and like you even said earlier you the transition from
lawyer to you know everything else you're doing now it took awhile people kind of think oh I'm gonna quit being a lawyer and start being a podcast or in the one he's just gonna roll it doesn't really work like that for anybody in the world you know it's a process and and it's a process of trying lots of different things it's a process of transition it's a process of finding more and more things that you enjoy and that you love doing and that your passions maybe Li and then and
maybe when you find something you're passionate about you're able to double down on it enough so that it again you're not risking too much but you double down and you see how how it works and how it feels and it's a
process yeah so you've got this book about billionaires think like a billion yeah I feel like culturally we were in a moment where we're fetishizing these people
and on both sides yeah
both sides meaning what
like some people you know you'll see politically people say well banish all billionaires or like so right somebody in politics said and this is not I'm very apolitical but so in politics said you know billionaires have not earned the money they took their money so there's a very kind of almost violent revolutionary backlash against these people who have accumulated this one particular number or more and on the flip side you can say well these are people perhaps who have accumulated certain habits
that maybe you'd want to emulate if you wanted to success even if it wasn't success about money and then you can also say okay well are there benefits to this class of people who have accumulated so much well are they giving to charity are they solving world problems are they creating impact more than if the money was being used in other ways and I shouldn't even say say being used because often money is created that's something that's in a lot of people to understand how the economy there could be more money next year than they
are there is this year because people people who are Innovative use their Innovations to create money seemingly out of thin air but you know if Elon Musk sells more Tesla's and he raises money by having an IPO and his Tesla goes public and whatever money is basically created and put some to some extent put into his pocket so it's not like they took they've created it out of their Innovations but sometimes they're bad guys and sometimes our guys like anyone else
I mean there is a sense. I think that you don't get to that level of of wealth and accumulation without stepping on a lot of people and having to do some dastardly things.
Yeah, I think that's I think that's kind of the sense and it's easy to have that sense because let's say there's a few thousand billionaires and there's 300 million other people in the US. So we're all allowed to trash this. They're certainly not a minority just because even though there's just a few thousand them. They're very they're people who are very privileged and benefit and and they have every advantage in
Xiety, and by the way, some of them are really bad people but some of them are enormously charitable like you look at efforts like Bill Gates. And again, I don't know if you whether you like Microsoft Windows or not, but you look at Bill Gates. He has spent hundreds of millions or billions to try to eradicate malaria in Africa and you ask yourself. Well, if the money had gone to a government instead of Bill Gates, would that government have been able to solve malaria as
well I don't know I'm not an expert but it seems like Gates has made a dent on it and nobody else historically has made a dent on it and I heard one interesting story where Bill Gates gave like a hundred million dollars to a government just like the u.s. might give a hundred million dollars to the government lets you know here's Aid solve malaria and then that particular government was corrupt the leaders left and the money was just God not spent disappeared probably into some Swiss account the leaders moved away and whatever
so the next leader got in and Bill Gates said okay I'm going to give you a hundred million again but now I'm going to have more control over it and see how you spend it and see where it's put and he made a dent in eradicating malaria and this particular country so you have to look at instances to and see what's what's happening what are these people doing with the money
right but isn't Bill Gates more of an outlier in that regard like there's a lot of there's a lot of guys with you know lots of yachts and yeah like
that I was a he is an outlier I would but there's also
but you know there's thousands of billionaire so let's even say there's a few hundred outliers who are trying to do charitable things and by the way I'm not trying to really the purpose was of that book was to say okay I've been so bad in such a failure at dealing with money maybe I could learn what did they do that I don't do that's I could learn from so he really had nothing to do with whether they were good or bad and so I always feel like I'm apologizing a little
not about making money it's about right habits and a perspective on
life and how they kind of live their day on The Daily that right that lead them in that
direction right like not a single thing in that book is about well this is the kind of investing they did and this is the kind of companies they would start and here's how they would boss people around but just on the Bill Gates thing yes he's probably an outlier but you do see lots of examples of charitable things or even let's say not charitable like you know Ken langone multi-billionaire started Home Depot he he saw a problem which is that many
People didn't have access to the full range of Home Improvement tools that they would probably want and he created Home Depot it became big and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs were created. It's just, you know, maybe millions of jobs over the 30 years Home Depot has been around and you know over a hundred thousand people got very wealthy by being employees of Home Depot. So he created real wealth in society solve lots of problems now Ken langone almost every hospital.
New York is named after him because he gives so much to charity and I don't really know him so I can't say good or bad. But again I ask myself well, okay, it seems like both from the capitalist idea created lots of jobs and he solved a big problem. He was also charitable. What other than I ask what habits did he have that maybe are worth emulating and if somebody else has a different opinion of him, that's fine. But then I can say well I like these habits and I'll emulate them having a strong family for instance or having, you know in a strong ability to
Execute on ideas, which is something I didn't always
have right. I mean you kind of break it down. You've got like Obsession and you know overcoming resistance persuasion empathy problem solving and this idea of skill versus habit, which I thought was super
interesting. Yeah, like it's not like these people have a lot of these people have real skills as opposed to just oh they're waking up at 6 a.m. Every day or they're, you know going to the gym every day. These are all good habits and healthy habits to have but how did Richard
And persuade some of the Boeing to lend this 27 year-old. Nobody an entire plane like $150,000,000 plane. I can't call a Boeing and just ask for a plane like they'll hang up on. What do you mean you tried to buy Greenland? Why not? I well.
Yeah, it's true. But he spells it in the hole was that there was an anti-competitive climate at the
time. Well was that his Ace in the Hole or did he find that in the hall? Like he was the one who brought that up to them? Like he basically would said no and he's like well
how else are you going to compete and get competitive pricing with British Airways so he commits put this in their heads and convince them and so it's interesting to see the little nuances of how these people achieve things because it's it is nuanced each each skill they had you know their skills at persuasion or sales or execution or having creative ideas or even the way they would do things like so you know Daymond John's an interesting example
sample he was he was a waiter at Red Lobster and on the weekends he would so these hats on his corner and they had like hip-hop logos on it and then suddenly Macy's makes this hundred thousand dollar water and he doesn't he can't make $100,000 worth of hats his work instead of Works full-time as a way to Red Lobster so what did he do he said of course I will give you a hundred give me a week I'll get you a hundred thousand dollars worth of these hats he had no reason to say yes
and and and then he goes to his mom he's like Mom I need to mortgage your house and Seymour's his mom's house gets you know the money out hires a bunch of seamstresses and they work you know 24 hours a day in his mom's now mortgaged house and then a few days later he delivers the goods to Macy's they give them $100,000 check he pays off the bank gets picked the mortgage back and now he has fuba which goes on for six billion dollars in
sales so
it is the skill in that is
that that skill is what I call ready fire Aim so this kind of instinct to get already like he knew he sold hats $100,000 worth I had to Macy's he hadn't yet aimed he had no idea how he's going to do it but he fired he said yes I'll do it and and now this why is that a skill because he knew there would be some way he can connect the dots and you probably already have thought it out but he knew no matter what there would be some way he could connect the
It's and a lot of people would say I can't you tell you $100,000 where they believed I could sell you a thousand dollars. We could do a test or whatever. He he just went right for it. And so Sara Blakely who she's the founder of Spanx. She had a similar things just to Hitler's wife Jessie as his wife is Jesse. I'm sure it's been on my guys have been on my mind a bunch of times and she was selling fax machines door-to-door. She had this idea for Spanx. She goes to sell them. He only has her one.
Example spanks the woman tried it on and said, yeah, I'll buy three hundred thousand dollars worth of it. And Sara Blakely is like done. I'll get it to you. Right she had no manufacturers. He didn't know how to manufacture close at all and it's not easy to convince some Factory to manufacture all of these clothes for you. Are you going to pay the well, who are you you're not a real company and yet she found a manufacturer. She delivered the close of in Spanx was in business. So that was again this ready fire aim ability,
but
fire aim has to be underpinned by a profound sense of belief in oneself right believe a woman's job you're not going to you're not going to move forward on ready fire aim unless you you like have some level of deep conviction about what you're
doing yeah and it and she Sara Blakely and Daymond John in this case had had enough experience with let's say clothing and clothing design to roughly know how they were going to connect the dots maybe they fully know but more likely they roughly knew how they could do this how they could scale
well what they were already doing to something hundred or thousand times more and so you needed this confidence but you need knowledge to so another example is Byron Allen he recently a few years where you bought the weather channel for 300 million dollars so he started out it was a stand-up comedian actor he was the youngest guy ever on the Johnny Carson show and and then he had all sorts of weird experiences in comedy and he said you know what I don't want to be in front of the camera I want to be behind it I want to be the business guy that's where the power seems to
so he started pitching these shows late night shows to television networks and I know this sounds kind of weak and he said don't worry about it you don't have to buy this show let's just do a 50/50 split on the ads and then he found the advertisers and it cost the the station's nothing if he didn't come with the money they would never have are to show but he kept fighting the advertisers and it's like 25 years later these shows are still running and he's accumulated so much money for them that he bought the weather channel four
300 billion he's bought other
networks it's such a crazy story because if you don't know that story he's just the weird guy at 3 a.m. you because that show is still on I
think I turn it on yeah he's interview she has you
like who is that guy still doing that and it's kind of like it's not really a quality shot good show and you're like the show's been on
for like 20 years
like how is this possible well it's because he owns everything yeah and he's sold all
the ads and you know at that time a lot of networks and still do they just have
for a half hour so he they basically say to him if you we're running the infomercial unless you show up with like one penny more we're running the infomercial so he just went out there got the advertisers and got syndicated all over the United States created you know es networks I think is the name of his
company and yeah he was like a fair-to-middling stand-up comic who is part of that whole like Comedy Store you know ecosystem and I'm sure everybody told him he was insane for why do you know what nobody would even think to do
that
yeah and it's scary to in all these instances there's a little bit of a Fear Factor like oh gosh what if I don't raise the money but he limits his risk it's like he doesn't have to put together the show either really first off you see those shows they're really cheaply done it's just yeah they're like a podcast on TV and and but he's he went out and sold the advertising and again that's ready fire aim but there's also skills in sales creativity persuasion and knowing what doors to knock on and and if that didn't work
Sure, he would have found some other thing. We think that's like their one idea. And if they didn't do that, they would have been a failure now. My guess is all three of these people Daymond John Sara Blakely buyer now and they probably would have succeeded at some other idea of that one hadn't worked
right well on this theme of experimentation you you decide to publish this book on script. Yeah, so that's so bizarre. Yes. Oh, so do you do that?
I've so I published mainstream quite a bit and then I've self-published quite a bit.
So Choose Yourself was self-published and actually is my best-selling book and I
self-published the smartest thing you ever did.
Yeah. That was yeah. That was basically I'm so glad I self-published that one and I did what I called professionally self-published choose yourself. Like I hired a real cover designer. I hired real editors. I hired a real marketing company and I really did it as if I was a Publishing Company even even better than what I thought a Publishing Company would do and it worked really well. But for this one, I felt like, you know, I've already done one route. I've done another route I want
experiment a little bit and script is like this Netflix for books you sign up and whatever there's many yeah you can read every book that's been published ever or close to it and they just started doing kind of like what Netflix they were shows they started creating their own original book Scribd originals and size they approached me I was I was telling the CEO about this book and he said well haven't we publish it as a script original and I said okay and so it's an experiment and it's kind of six months exclusive there
and it's great so I really enjoyed the experience I've done you know part of the experiment was what are the benefits well we have a million-plus subscribers that get their emails oh so my name will be on an email to a million people so just more you know this is not the last book I'm ever doing or it's not the first book but it's nice to have exposure to an additional million size audience and to build a relationship with this Netflix of books depending on they seem to be continue growing and so yes just
another
experiment and are you happy with how it's working out there like is there a sense that this was The Right Move versus just putting it up on Amazon as a self-published
work yeah because on Amazon again I'm like every other book out there and it's not like I'm against Amazon I love publishing there and I love self-publishing there but here's a case where I'm one of the only books in this category of script Originals in a website that you know maybe up to two million people go to all the time so I figured let's see if this is a real advantage and you always
as want to go to the room least crowded so when we were doing when we start doing podcasting particularly when you were started doing it this is this was the room least crowded and media now it's very crowded but it's like you said earlier it's good thing we got here when it wasn't crowded so we could carve out our space and here I'm on script that's in publishing so I don't know something like 5 million books a year published now on Amazon a lot of them self-published okay here's a place where there's only four books published in this way
right you know they all the mainstream published books are on script yes I'd
opportunity is much higher yeah for having something break out a meaningful
way and if the book failed completely okay it'll be like 18 of my other 22 box red bell completely so there's no big
deal one of the things that I think we share in common is is an aversion to setting long-term goals like I don't know about you but people ask me all the time like what's your vision like where do you see yourself in
five years or what you know what what's your life like in 10 years and I honestly like I always feel guilty or perhaps even ashamed because I don't even think about that like I can half the time I'm I find myself like making something up to answer the question and I've realized more recently like I'm just going to be honest like I don't I have no idea and I don't really expand mental energy in that
way that's why I didn't know that about you because I do think a lot of people talk in terms of what I want to be here in three years and then six years then
and yours and and then we'll in order to be here in 10 years I've got to do this today and like next month and whatever and I think it makes no sense to have goals it's sort of implies that my knowledge now is so much greater than it might even be in 10 years from now that my 10 year from now version of myself better listen to me now because I'm smarter now in terms of where I should be in 10 years I don't know if this is all adding up all the numbers but basically you're learning more every day so tomorrow or next
next month I might know something about myself and my interest and my passions are about the world the change is where I want to be in a month or two months or in a year so you can I don't understand like how people could even figure out how will I even know what they want to be in one year or five
years well I think that goals have their place like if you say you know if you say like this is something I want to manifest in the next year then there are certain steps you're going to have to undertake to realize that like if I'm if I want to do a crazy Race For example or complete a book
there are you can set up benchmarks to lead you in that direction and I think that's completely appropriate but I think forecasting a vision for your life I guess it works for some people for me it doesn't like everything that has been successful in my life has been I wouldn't call it happenstance but it didn't result from me you know putting it on a vision
board yeah like like you know I think that's a good difference between goals and what was the word you just used
Stepping Stones no Edge marks
now but but like that aspirations you know there's a difference between having something that you're moving towards today so like let's say you want to get a faster running time for a marathon okay you could adjust things a little bit and how you're running and today you're going to try this and see if you're running is faster but what if two months from now and and all of this could be because a year from now you want to enter in this Marathon
and do it faster than a certain time but what if two months from now I don't know Disney calls you up and says ritual we want you to play Iron Man's father and the next Iron Man movie and you're like well I was going to do this marathon and that's my goal so I call me back in a year you want to do that you would just change now that's an extreme example but yeah so today you could say well I really want to Benchmark myself against how I'm doing a race and I'm going to improve otherwise you would just there's no reason to do anything
thing but things change and the things you love doing change what if suddenly decide oh man I really love writing cookbooks and you decide two months into the year I really just want to spend this year all my creativity writing cookbooks in that and your goals change so the year I started more passionately doing stand-up comedy my goal so to speak for the year was I was going to write a novel that was where I was gonna put my creativity but then I just started going up more than
so we got a stage and then I got heckled ones and I'm like you know what I'm gonna just next week I'm gonna come back three times I'm going to figure out why I was heckled and I'm gonna talk to people and think about this and it just never stopped and never got back to writing that novel things
change but ultimately the Fidelity is to your curiosity right yeah I think when you when you double down on your curiosity and you have the willingness and the tenacity to follow that like to keep continue to pull on that thread it
creates a compounding interest that that in a real world context shows up in opportunities that you couldn't have predicted or
imagined yeah like let's say for instance Greenland suddenly
James we now we're interested
yes so suddenly or or let's say suddenly out some of these as you know this is a great idea how about we write a movie about somebody who buys Greenland and what happens right and okay I would actually work yeah like well I would say
yes to any of a possibilities instead of going back to a stand-up stage you know it just because you sort of fall in love with different things and you experiment enough with enough things that you know you figure out oh yeah this is pulling me a little bit more so I'm going to double down on it and then everybody will what wait a second you were just doubling down on this other thing no no no now I really feel more passionate about this so again it's as long as you don't say and I'm not going to take care of my kids anymore I'm going to backpack around the world like a certain
abilities that you have to do but again in with given our creativity is very free we could do we could spend in most cases how we want and you should try lots of things and and see where your heart is kind of compelling you to go further even whether you're failing or succeeding at that point doesn't matter it's like where you want to get better at this is fun when I'm doing it and it's not fun when I'm doing other things right
in thinking about this podcasting space
there's a how many podcasts are there now like I
think two million two million yeah million
podcasts like how many hours of people talking spontaneously about whatever's going on in their mind and I thought the other day I thought what if podcasting existed in like 1780 you know what if what would podcasting look like an 18th like if we could go back and just listen to people talking about the times in that time what an incredible historical record that would be that would shape and
and and change how we think about history and how we consume history and how we synthesized world events and now we're creating that now like a hundred years from now this will all still be you know available to people yeah back on and and try to better understand you know this moment in
time yeah I mean you know imagine back in the 1780s like just Benjamin Franklin and John Adams would be having like you know what if Marcus
Aurelius instead of like you know writing his meditations was doing a podcast
just about yeah
pockets of stoicism Seneca can you please come on a podcast I'll promote your notes of Seneca we'll talk about it everywhere and yeah and you know I wonder about now with two million how do you separate out the good from the bad and I don't like to call any of them bad like everyone's trying but again it's like we're talking about earlier I'm trying to just always understand formats and how much you know how can I change the foreground
Bernadette just slightly even from my usual one and I know you've been doing a lot of great stuff with YouTube and videos like you've been combining kind of your podcast voice with kind of more conceptual video about what you're talking about
and just started doing that and I want to do more of that but that's that's an
experiment yeah totally an experiment how long will you do it maybe do 10 of them five of them 50 of them and people will say well no you got to be consistent in Focus that could be true it may be you need to do a thousand of and then it just suddenly have
lines of views per video but you might get tired of doing them after 20 and you say now it's let's focus on Tick-Tock instead so or whatever you focus on next and so yeah it's just a matter of I'm always it's interesting now to because another thing that's happened in the media world that's changed which is that I think followers don't matter anymore so people have you know X number of Twitter followers YouTube subscribers Instagram followers Facebook followers I don't think that matters anymore because I think algorithms
have have basically ruled over followers so the algorithm will decide where your who sees your video or who sees your photo not so much your followers because if you have let's say you have a hundred thousand followers or even 10,000 followers and let's say a lot of them have hundreds of followers and their on Instagram for three minutes the algorithms got to pick which one of their followers are going to be rewarded with their eyesight so I think it's very hard on today's world to come up with good appealing
and that rises to the top and it's in a good way it's much more equality and everyone's got an equal footing because followers don't matter as much on the second hand it's harder to curate I think
well it makes it right for trying to manipulate it becomes about manipulating the algorithm yeah I think that leads to substandard content in order to game the system but I think it is true like the follower count thing I mean there was a day you know in 2009 if somebody with a million followers
lowers like retweeted your Tweet oh yeah you would you would get celebrated five minutes you would get 30,000 new people following you like now every once in a while somebody of that stature will share something that I've done a zero impact yeah anything you know it's like that ship has sailed and I don't have a huge Facebook following I think it's like a hundred thirty thousand or something like that it's substantial but I'll post the podcast on Facebook and it'll get like two shares yeah like it'll and it'll show you how
people sees it now be like 400 people it's like unless you pay to boost this stuff or create ad campaigns around it they just choke it
so I try try that too I pay ad campaigns sometimes around the podcast does useless doesn't work like just so I'll have 50,000 people view it magically I don't know who these 50,000 people are and they don't matter yeah so five people clicked on it right so there's not even has something to do with the content I don't know what it has to do with and and I'm pretty sure I'm structuring these ads right but I don't know all of
of that it's always important to still have as high quality as possible but other things are sort of rising to the top of importance and it's they're harder to figure out and I don't like the idea it's even hard to game the algorithm but I don't even like thinking in that way
somehow I never think about it yeah ultimately like I think you know people will say oh you should do this and you should die here's the strategy and here's how you should lay out your Instagram and I just can't I can't wrap my head around any of that and I just believe to this day
even if it's hard that ultimately you know the highest quality content will rise to the surface and it will find its audience and that means that you have to be in it for the long run and you have to be patient and you can't be upset if it's not getting the nut you know the level of attention that somebody else who's who's specifically crafted content to create some level of virality is going to get
yeah and so so what's interesting there is you have a specific point of
view also so you're not you're not just hoping that the quality is is going to get a lot of people you have a point of view that people if they own they want your point of view they have to listen to you and so it could be you get let's say a hundred thousand super loyal people listening to your podcast and you say there's always this other person have a million people well they're just talking about I don't know the election every day and then those people going to disappear or not they're not saying anything unique it's just a getting give you the latest news or whatever
ever and you know so I think sometimes even measuring the number is the wrong metric but we're used to it in this social media world how many followers how many subscribers how many downloads and you have to get back to like well if only a thousand people like me but they really love it I
mean I think that's more valuable yeah guy honestly yeah that my ego always wants something to be bigger and to be growing at a certain trajectory But ultimately what's meaningful about this work that you do and that I
I do is the capacity to impact people and to the extent that you can improve the quality of the work to to exacerbate that impact in a positive sense so that they're left with something substantial that really can move the needle and how their live their lives that's that's the opportunity there and so I try my best to like remain focused on
that yeah and and and so let me ask you this has anyone ever walked up to you and said oh my God Rich Roll your Instagram changed my life
like has anyone ever said that to you know write with old coffee I bet you they have come up to you and said ritual your podcast changed my life yeah that happens a lot yeah and so do you yeah and and again no one's ever said to me oh man your Instagram I love it I check it out every day like no one said that and I have just as much followers there may be as any place else and you start to realize okay well why my pursuing that is it just for the numbers or like really where where
know where people are being impacted because they tell me and so why am I trying to get Tick-Tock followers or whatever I
know you just you joined Tick-Tock right
yeah I joined Tick-Tock and by the way that's a very creative media I'm not hiding my
daughter would they've specifically prohibited me from joining Tick-Tock
now they use it and they don't like what
they use it they use it my younger one more than my older one but she was just more because I was joking with her the other day I was I'm going to join Tick-Tock I got to check this out you're not half joking like that's kind of where I
draw the generational line you know
it's like but take sides really great about yeah love it yeah
videos so I was like I was kind of playing around with it and and and and my youngest daughter was just appalled she's like please don't please don't
yeah I mean I was playing around with it and then there I put I didn't have any followers and I put up one video I put up a couple videos of one video got something like 200,000 views and so I thought that was interesting that okay there they're treating me algorithm differently than other
places because it's Twitter
2007 like the opportunity to grow rapidly is available on that platform because it's a new platform
right but then I looked at the video that they get me the 200,000 views and I thought man that is the stupidest video I've ever done and so it's just meaningless like right right so I'd rather just do the podcast and not
get we like dancing or something what were you doing
well that one people beg me to take down and I did ya like that Ike I decide okay this is beyond being afraid of what people will think of me I'm making a fool of myself so
I took that one down
you telling you can tell you could test out your material though
I could and I've seen people do that and kind of comedians it's interesting cuz you I saw kind of what I would say were regular Club comedians in New York City going Tick-Tock and suddenly get millions of years and twenty fifty thousand followers and that actually was an indicator to me that this person was funny and appealing to a certain audience and that that was a data point for me when sort of seeing could I own a comedy club to so that was a data point
and seeing how should this person before more here or or not or whatever but for me I just put up some articles that I like an article I wrote In 2011 I took it and just basically set it in a tick tock kind of fashion and I got 200,000 views and another one that was against College got like a hundred thousand views or eighty thousand views so I thought okay it's an interesting a little bit but not enough but it would take a lot of time even doing a 15-second video so I figured okay it's not this is not worth
really doubling down on it's an experiment and it
right I appreciate the experimentation and I also think it speaks to something that like Gary Vee talks about all the time which is not being romantic about the platforms like whatever's working move in that direction like you you do lots of things but fundamentally I think of you as a writer right and this is you know you really develop your audience through your blogging on your website but then kind of blogging you know really it's not like a thing anymore right now that'd just to podcasting
that's the problem with writing is that but like writing should never go out of
style it's yet nobody is a blogger anymore
yeah no there's no destination blocks like it used to be the case there's no destination websites
trying to get people to go to your website is futile you have to go where everyone already is
yeah and so I think I mean then for a while like places like LinkedIn and medium work but I don't really see that as much now so I don't know again it's like Pete when people come up to me and say oh I love ex It's usually the podcast and then one out of 10 will be right
writing and it's never anything
else and what do you think how do you think about iterating on that going forward like we're like forecasting where podcasting is going and perhaps you know being an early adopter of whatever the evolution of that
is I think it's all it's always hard to predict like if you look at what's happening now I mean so we were doing the interview format and a lot of people do that and look the best that the most popular podcast in the world you love Joe Rogan show is the interview
format so that's kind of staying
but people talking I would I can't imagine is ever going to go out of style and what the substantive interesting entertaining conversation
yeah and then and then what's interesting is that storytelling is hitting the top 10 or the top 50 of the top 100 so like True Crime Story so it's like back to 1920s dime novels about crime that's what's shooting up the fastest right now in podcasting and then I would say also
so podcasts and I look at Joe Rogan as an example podcast with a bunch of comedians talking is interesting and again Joe Rogan's got the most popular podcasts in the world and he is a stand-up comedian often he has his comedian friends on that's his who is interviewing and so I wonder if that's because it's a safe place to to have extreme opinions but not be accused of being polarized in one way or the other so like Joe and other people like that will say whatever they want like it's just
saying what they'll say and if they were like a big you know intellectual order or whatever people say you can't say that it's this you can't say that about climate change this about climate change you can't say this about the Republicans Or democrats the other way but Joe you can ever figure out well because it about
he his genius is that you know he's the first Hill to say like well I'm a dummy comedian like your why are you believing what anything I have to say and that's always his refrain
Jon Stewart says the same thing throughout the
fire even though everybody admitted they got all their news from The Daily Show Jon Stewart would always say oh I'm not a news guy I'm just a comedian for the we all he knew we all got our news from The Daily Show
right well in the way that that that the porn industry drove technological innovation on the internet comedians really are responsible for the birth of podcasting like they were there they were the early adopter yeah we're like Marc Maron Adam carolla's in the guy yeah and like the early days of podcasting it was almost entirely
like Comedians and you're correct in that now what's capturing people's attention beginning with serial are these longer highly produced stories you know our friend Neil Strauss did to Live and Die in LA to tremendously well and those are the ones that are kind of rising to the top so does that leave you thinking like maybe I'll do something in that space like the amount of work that goes into crafting that like if you even if you took one interview and you like chopped it up and then you put voiceover of you contextualizing it kind of like somehow the gimlet shows do it
like I thought about that and I thought that's just going to take up too much time like this is already taking up too much of my time I'm sorry about that right well yeah and you've gone to you're going to four times a week with your
show now but because two of those episodes and maybe even three is just going to be me bothered by something and talking about it perhaps with a foil perhaps someone's in there who to tell me I'm wrong but it's not going to be the standard okay gosh I've gotta read 12 books you know this week too
prepare for my interview subjects and six of us yeah it's exhausting so I kind of wanted to say it's like what you were saying about somebody said you know why are people listening to you they weren't listening to see what you were asking the other person they really wanted to hear you and so I figured okay let me just try this I'm going to say what I think is important to me this week and why and how I'm being impacted and kind of Storytelling about me a little bit or a big knee people have
of is like say say when I ran happen so January 3rd you know we attack this guy we kill this guy and and my kids were saying to me is are we getting drafted is there is World War 3 about to happen so there was this real fear among everybody and I see it even my kids and so I called up a big military expert and I said just I don't know anything and there's just a bunch of what I call Spectators out there arguing all day long on Twitter and Facebook like they know something just let me ask you
questions answer them and now I'll know some more and so that's what I did and I think calming people down is a good role for podcasters with an audience if you can get those guests and not have a traditional guess but like this is really scaring me right now let's break down what's happening think that's an easier format to prepare for because I know what I'm scared of and I'm going to try doing that a little bit more as
well yeah I think that with that then you have to embrace the idea of
doing this contemporaneous with current events like I'm trying to do interviews that withstand the test of time and have an evergreen nature to them and you know banked a bunch of interviews and sometimes there's a long waiting period between they go and I and then I feel bad about it because yes and so I know wait are you ever going to put that thing up that we did and trying to find a way to be more facile with it so from time to time and I can make you know I can do a more current event oriented kind of show
I've also I've done I think I'm at
543 right now is Alban Evergreen but I'm trying every now and then to be a little current event just because sometimes people are scared and there's no one the media isn't properly addressing their fears because everybody's one side or the other side and they're not just looking at facts and also the media has incentive to kind of exaggerate certain facts or change certain facts and not blaming the medium it's everybody and so sometimes I just want to know should I be afraid
or Not Afraid so for instance you know there's a lot of the discussion lately about well is AI and Technology going to wipe out 30 million jobs in the u.s. like like all these people are saying and so I've been in the computer science Industry a long time ago but I called up current experts in Ai and automation just to see where things were at and I found out and got less afraid it was able to communicate that so that's not going to be Evergreen but it's good to answer this question for the next
six months to a year that people have it right and so sometimes now I'm just again playing to see me I need to be a little bit more current just a saw just a calm people down on really super important
issues of all these ideas that you've put out in the world what idea stands out as the one that that that people went the most crazy about like you shouldn't go to college or
you okay no the what the most controversial well College one has gotten me death threats so I highly doubt that
Sanford so this is crazy this guy wrote me like you know he said all these things I'm gonna I'm gonna kill you and his IP address or whatever was on the email somehow I was able to figure out his IP address turned out to be Brown University so he's writing from Brown University and he put his name so I called up so my whole thing was is that I don't think kids in today's day and age not necessarily 30 years ago or 40 years ago but in today's day and age kids shouldn't go to college because it's reinforced
in the system of higher and higher tuitions an entire generation of 30 million kids are going more and more in debt which is going to crease income inequality and more and more bad things will happen and you could learn these skills now from all these online sites and but there's a societal pressure anyway that's my whole thing I called and this guy wrote right me wrote me a death threat and so I called Brown University Police they put me in charge of the the chief of police and I should say allegedly
Lee Brown I don't know if I don't get upset at me so and and and I read the email and I said the name of the guy and the chief of police was yeah that's pretty bad and oh by the way yeah we we know that guy he did a similar thing with the school librarian and I'm like well shouldn't you do something about this and he's like come on it's March do you really want a season a senior year just let him graduate and and I'm like well he's gonna graduate maybe
yeah that's the situation you are you know two years from
now he does something really bad and nobody did
anything right and but there was nothing I can do really like but the thing that's gotten people the most antagonist deck of all was home ownership so I would write there's a lot of financial reasons why you shouldn't own a home there's a lot of reasons why it's a really bad idea and and people got really upset about that I did it on Yahoo finance it got over 10,000 comments got you know millions of views and shares and and I've written
an article I've done it as a podcast because that's the biggest discuss financial decision you make in your life is all
this it's also a source of tremendous Pride for a lot of PS so you're basically challenging people's sense of
themselves yeah and and if you also spend that kind of money your brains not going to let you think reday afterwards to test it yeah you have investment bias it's a mental model and your brain is not like you think you made a stupid decision so people will fight that to the Bone like I've lost friends over that
I've lost friends over the college thing I lost almost friends over though an article I wrote on there should you should know war is ever really Justified and and I said I don't know anything not a historian but clearly like you go back that has four or five Wars they're ridiculous and I'll even go as far as to say why do we do the Revolutionary War like clearly Canada didn't suffer because they didn't have a revolutionary war and somebody
start writing what about the Peloponnesian War I'm like I don't even know what that is so clearly it doesn't matter to me and but then I did lose friends like somebody called me up month I realized I hadn't heard from a friend in a while and I call him like what's what's what's wrong and he's like your for your obviously pro-slavery and I'm like what how come what are you talking about how gotta be posting and he said you you said no work could be justified so that means the Civil War can't be justified well slavery justifies it and I said you could have just called me and asked me if I
think minardi should be slaves like clearly I don't and I said well look at the England got rid of slavery in 1831 maybe we hadn't done the Revolutionary War there wouldn't be slavery because we were in part of England and I said I don't know history I just feel like when twenty percent of the country is died shooting each other and it's all 17 year old kids it's probably not the best idea that maybe would have been another way to do it but I said I don't know I just think kids shooting kids is a bad idea
well two things me first of all they these friends that you've lost couldn't have been you know great friends if that one was like after 20 years of friendship I was
really surprised but he but he was a Indian descent and you know took kind of personal to understand and and I'm Jewish I said look I don't think World War II should have happened right but
this is like to know you is to know that that you're very much a provocateur and the sense like when I see here's another crazy idea that James has
I'm thinking about you know it's like you put it out there and I think there's a you know perhaps slightly unconscious like Glee that you get from like let's see what happens with this
yeah a little bit but I don't try I don't say things for his I don't believe you know I don't blindly disbelieve like you know you take you there's enough research to basically connect the dots like what the theory is first it's probably not a good idea
dear to send 18 year olds to kill other 18 year olds because bad things will happen and then you have to look at there's all sorts of ways to look at every war but you I also know history is written by not just the winners but a very tiny percentage of the winners right history and they kind of make the facts fit what happened now all these situations obviously everything was horrible who knows what the right solution was war turned out to be the solution to some big catastrophic problems it's just a thought experiment what if there was never
or a war what would what would it be like less people would die
so it's it's it's leveraging a couple of the mental models that that Shane Parish talks about its thought experiment but it's also first order thinking like your here's something we accept that's just kind of locked in our awareness as being true or just the way it should have been you know should be or or is right and you're saying well let's forget about that and look at it completely differently yeah and then taking kind of a counterintuitive
in on it yeah just a just a slight
thing you know we dropped the atomic bomb twice because the theory was that oh and this is how history has been written a million American lives would have been lost if we did a full-scale land invasion of Japan I don't know if that's true no one's ever told me how where the house numbers add up to a million and and also there was a lot of people arguing back then that maybe we should just contain Japan until they give up their already kind of almost giving up and
so it's very unclear or what happened or why dropped two bombs yeah why you have two bombs they were literally about to capitulate you can argue it now they're going to hold out but we didn't need to invade them at that point The Million Lives wouldn't have been lost so who knows you always have to question you know why are people doing things in a certain way what's the there's gotta be a back story and a backstory to that and I flip story and all the stuff we have no clue
about right all right well we got around this down but let's talk a little bit before we end about
your perspective on on the biggest ways in which people get in their own way yeah that's a good question
let me ask you like what you know what do you think is the biggest way you get in your own way you've mentioned a couple you feel how
imposters yeah impostor syndrome I'm I'm insecure you know sitting here looking at you but I'm thinking like do I sound like a dummy know like what what's the next question can I keep the momentum of this guy you know like I get up in my own head
and I'm My Own Worst
Enemy by the way it's really hard being a podcaster right you have to kind of fake
that's when I said wow you're doing four of these a week like I've done Saturday Tuesday Wednesday this is the fourth one that I've done in five or six days it's hard and I'm like tired and I'm like okay but James is coming got to be on my game so I can't imagine doing for every week so that's why the stamina endurance contest in its own right but in terms of how I get it
we're like I think yeah I I'm profoundly insecure you know like I have tools to keep those things at Bay and I'm very self aware of a lot of these limitations but they still infect my ability to you know kind of optimize my what I'm trying to
accomplish I think I think but I think you nailed it though with being self-aware and not necessarily you know it's everybody could say oh you need to be more self-aware self-aware so
software and it's hard to do you have to really be honest with what are my weaknesses what are my strengths so I know I I have like a huge weaknesses and psychological issues around let's say money I've gone broke so many times I'm like literally afraid to look at my bank
account but you have this ability to create money as well yeah I've invented not times I must be Kansai loser to lose it all like you're like yeah but I figured it this out so many times
it's always a disaster every
those I'm knocking A Lot on wood right now but also I think knowing being aware of what you're interested in doing so one point it's about a year ago I was pitching a TV show and a network picked it up and I thought to myself huh this TV show idea is good but do I really want to do it is going to take thousands of hours of time I don't think I want to do it and so knowing knowing when your heart wants to do something when your heart doesn't
I want to do something I think is really important part of that
self-awareness like a narrative show or no it was like a kind of social
experiment reality show I'll tell you the idea since I'm not totally not doing it but I was gonna take six random people off the street and the premise of the show was if they followed my advice exactly I would make them a millionaire within six months so but you know some would bail someone succeed so when we would like beat me up or whatever like you know typical reality show stuff
but I thought to myself they won't networks Not Really Gonna know if this is good until it's over until I've done it and what if it doesn't work or it's just going to take out a huge amount of time flying all around the country they want to people in every city and and they wanted more than 6 is just a pick the best six so he's so much work I have felt myself like afraid of doing that much work so ultimately it didn't happen but I think also being aware of like what you're willing to do what you're not willing to do
so the self-awareness
Earnest peace and that is is the understanding like this isn't really what I want to do and then following that up with pulling the plug on it even though it could be this huge amazing opportunity
yeah yeah because look if there's a lot of ways to go for making money making a TV show or doing a podcast or going into stand-up comedy or not or even being a writer those are not ways to make a lot of money don't you don't go into those thinking man I'm going to make billions now forget being a plumber now I'm going to be
podcaster that just going to start rolling in that just doesn't happen so so I think a lot of it is about just being aware of what your capabilities are what you really want to do versus what you're what you don't want to do understanding what skills you don't know so somebody could say I want to be an entrepreneur well what's what's entrepreneurship there's no skill called entrepreneurship entrepreneurship is this bag of other skills like sales ideas execution marketing motivation leadership
worship is all these other skills and added together it equals this you could call this one meta skill entrepreneurship but that's not really a skill so understanding what if you want to do something what micro skills you need to learn you have to avoid you know in whatever you're doing you have to avoid smoking your own crack like you could think well I'm doing this so it must be great and I see that all time among entrepreneurs or even podcasters I'm doing this idea it must be the best idea in the world why aren't people coming to it I'm gonna have to
advertising now you should try to always ask if you're a smoking crack on your ideas because I think that's a real easy bias also that's a mental model as well right right
right what do you think is your your greatest strength like what is the secret James all tutor sauce that has propelled you to this
place I'm not sure because I'm not so sure I've done I'm not sure so sure I've been propelled anywhere but I think I'm I think I have a lot of fun coming
a up with ideas yeah so that's the thing I've written about the most is like I write down 10 ideas a day and it just I realized kind of shortly after I started doing this the that just writing 10 ideas a day and it could be about anything could be about just oh 10 ideas for Valentine's Day gifts tomorrow or ten ideas that Global could do to be better and they could all be bad ideas but if you just kind of exercise this idea muscle it really will get better and if you don't exercise the idea muscle it will
atrophy so the times when I was like losing all my money I was letting my idea muscle atrophy instead of no matter what no matter how bad things seemed I started always exercising this idea muscle writing 10 ideas a day down like I wrote ideas the other day for I wanted to make this card game again it's an experiment and I just wrote the rules isn't that was my 10 ideas of the day and and
so and I've had of those ideas how many of them do you take action on
one out of a thousand so people
say like how do you keep track of the ideas and how do you know which ones are going to be good that you never take action on them because it's really just like if you exercise by lifting weights it's not like you think the next day well I don't have to lift today because I lifted really good ways yesterday yes just practice and and you'll know the good ones because the next day you'll figure out 10 more ideas that are about that it might be ten execution ideas about one of the ideas from the day before or a week before our month before
one of the ones I heard you talking
recently was trying to pay for stuff with North Korean currency oh yeah Iranian currency
yeah so I on a fluke I wandered into this random Auction House it had currency and I just this guy had like this bag of money like just in the it was like this old dusty store you could picture it with all all these garbage bags full of stuff and I started finding like North Korean currency Saddam Hussein currency Idi Amin
these there was all this like weird dictator money and so I would I bought a bunch of it and I started I figured it'd be fun idea to videotape me trying to pay for things like hey I'm going to buy a cup of coffee hey I'm out of money but I have this you know Kim Young eel currency it's a ballad in North Korea and nobody ever has taken the money so they won't
even touch it right yeah
something some people it's weird some just I think maybe there
afraid it's infected with something or there's some poison I have no idea like what I
think well if it's a gnarly dictator money if it almost feels like you're complicit in that regime if you touch it yeah or maybe with a fender they think if they touch it then that constitutes an
agreement or maybe also because there's like sanctions we have sanctions against North Korea maybe if you are holding on to a bill from working against the long
but don't think anyone thinks about that it isn't weird it is an interesting thing though
though yeah because I always ask me well why did you not care touch it and they're like no I they re specifically don't
want to take probably don't have a good answer for
why they don't nobody is giving me an answer yeah they just don't want to like creeps them
out what's the next crazy experiment and then we'll finish this thing
well there's a lot really there's this skip the line book that's coming up and
you're doing that with a traditional publisher
yeah so almost an experiment to do to go mainstream
what a crazy experiment James is actually going to go the
traditional route well I really wanted to see how things have changed in that world and I think they have a little bit but they and everything I thought initially was that they rely on your marketing ability as well is true so but now they just everybody sort of knows the story like that's the they know you have to do that and you know you have to do it and and yeah a lot of things I'm experimenting with like I've been playing around with doing this card game and now I know how to do a Kickstarter because of Greenland so I'm gonna
do a Kickstarter for this card game once I print up the first version of it and that's just a fun thing you the key with an experiment is it shouldn't take up too much time or money another thing I've been doing is I've been putting what I call anti ads on the backs of cabs in New York City you ever go to New York City and you see on the back there's there's little TV show and there's ads and the ads will be for real products so I've been creating these ads that don't advertise anything so there's just like it is just like a
sure of me saying hi and and and they called me up they called me up and they said are you have to put a URL or do you want to put a URL or Twitter handle or something and like no that's the whole point know your well no
but that's again that's that's like performance art yeah it's a
little like that and I kind of want to see what happens though like does it and I've had at least one instance because I did this for a couple of months I'm doing this for a couple months and one guy now did come up to me last week and he's like yours that you're that Taxi
he guy my nine year old loves you and he took a selfie with me he didn't know my name he didn't owe anybody
anything other than you said hi and a
little sticker yeah and there's no and taxes TV people so we can't run this because originally I didn't even have high on it and they said we can't run this is a picture of your face yeah it was just a picture made and by the way it was really like it was I was wearing a white T-shirt and I was standing next to a white background so it was the worst possible way to structure a photo and the taxes TV people said we have to have a certain bar we have
professional advertisers advertising on this we can't run this so they made me put and I and they had a good idea which so they I can't say they made me but I they said make it a little bit of a sauce I put high on the first one and like high again on the second one and I forget what we put on the third one like a math puzzle or something but so that's an experiment and I have like
twins are up in New York right now cruising
around yeah oh my God and I have like 20 of these experiments going on these different types of things like this that
all seem small you know also working on another TV show which me much less work and experimenting with the format of the podcast and it's just things I do all the time to figure out okay if it doesn't take time or that much money I can do it and so I do
it I love it and I love you you're funny you're fantastic I love the work that you do and you know what let me just say this you look great and you seem really happy I'm really happy to see thank you Rich I've
been I wish I could say I've been living your
healthy lifestyle but you're always
thinking I've no you taking stabs at
it yeah I have taken says I remember one time you visited me and you were talking and my daughter I have my red hair daughter was about to turn full vegan I think you actually listening to you actually put her over the edge like she was just like listen sitting there like wrapped while you were talking and now she's been like literally a vegan ever since it's four years later I love it so so at least she's living that lifestyle but I try to be healthy
well we're working at this is this is this is perhaps
apps a new experiment for you yeah could they could be all right and well to be
continued yeah definitely thank you rich as always and I look forward to our our next get-together on on the
air sooner rather than later yeah cool piece
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