Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - James Altucher: Skip The Line (#119)

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

In Skip The Line: The 10,000 Experiments Rule and Other Surprising Advice for Reaching Your Goals, James Altucher busts the 10,000-hour rule of achieving mastery, offering a new mindset and dozens of techniques that will inspire any professional—no matter their age or managerial level—to pursue their passions and quickly acquire the skills they need to succeed and achieve their dreams. This episode is itself an experiment, as Brian onboards James to Clubhouse and uses it to interact with listeners live. James is a successful entrepreneur, angel investor, chess master and prolific writer. He has started and run more than 20 companies and is currently invested in over 30. He is the author of 18 books, including WSJ best-sellers: 'The Power of No' and 'Choose Yourself'. His latest book, "Reinvent Yourself" was #1 in the Amazon store shortly after its release. His writing has appeared in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Observer, Techcrunch , The Financial Times, Yahoo Finance and others. His blog, JamesAltucher.com, has attracted more than 20 million readers since its launch in 2010. He hosts a successful podcast, "The James Altucher Show" with guests of the caliber of Tony Robbins, Mark Cuban, Pieter Thiel, Arianna Huffington, Coolio, etc. His podcasts have had over 30 million downloads. Join him at JamesAltucher.com or on Twitter @Jaltucher on Instagram @altucher You can also text him questions on his personal cell phone [phone]:00:00 Intro 00:06:24 How do you keep motivated to do 10,000 experiments during the slow start? 00:07:48 How to hack the 10,000 rule to become great at almost anything. 00:33:11 The Michelson Morley Experiment Example: How it changed physics. 00:10:10 Why should experiments have high stakes? Being fearless! 00:14:09 An experiment in writing: Buying Greenland. 00:17:20 Experimentation pushes the limits of your knowledge. 00:21:20 Examples from games - Chess. 00:23:29 The 200 Experiment "rule". 00:25:11 The Plus-Minus-Equals method. The Spoke and Wheel Method. 00:27:31 Brian's Galileo Experiment. 00:33:47 The pajama experiment. 00:34:38 Applications to risk management and resiliency. 00:36:47 The Spoke and Wheel Method. 00:41:38 The one experiment that changed James Altucher's life forever. Overcoming the fear of failure. 00:53:41 Will there be a creator economy? Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. All right, James, we are live and we are recording. We are also live and we are here to discuss this that I got multiple copies of in the mail. Thanks to you, I'm going to get my very own copy from Amazon da Chum next week as we get everything dialed in for the launch of I think is your best book. I've read them all. I've read them all and I've talked about them all. I've bought them all for my friends in the process. You have all James Aldisher shelf on your in your house.

I do. And actually the whole library here at UCSD has been converted to the Altutcher wing. When you didn't have to donate that much, that first $25 million, those $25 million Bitcoin. I had to beat out Jim Simons, but fortunately the price of Bitcoin went up. So that's right. Because this book is nothing. if not a book about experiments. And I am an experimental physicist.

As James knows, we are deep involved in an experiment in exploring the universe in its many different forms, exploring the biggest topics under the multiverse, the existence of God or lack thereof, the existence of other universes or lack thereof. And now we're talking about something a little bit more practical than those, maybe how you can exceed, how you can,

as the subtitle says, use 10,000 experiments to reach surprising goals and other surprising advice for reaching your goals. And like all of James's book, this book, well, you've got to read it with a box of Kleenex, right, James? You're always writing with in mind that if the reader's not in tears of joy, pain, and self-growth, you didn't do your job, right? Yeah, I mean, the thing about getting good at something that is worth getting good that it's going to suck most of the time.

Like let's say, let's say you're trying to win the Nobel Prize in physics, a subject you know a lot about. You love physics, you love doing the experiments, you love pursuing the dream, you love asking the questions like where, how did the universe begin?

And yet pursuing a dream most of the time sucks because that's the reason why it's a dream. Most people can't do it. Most people, you know, along the way, you suffer failure, you suffer loss, you try different experiments and they don't work out. Let's say you want to be a professional tennis player. As you're rising up through the ranks, you're going to start losing more than you ever have as a kid. You're going to start playing tournaments and you're going to start losing. So most of the time, there's struggle. People think, oh, I'm going to pursue my dream and then I'll be happy.

I'm going to find my passion and then I'll be happy. Finding your passion is not happiness, but achieving mastery at something, being in the top 1% of your field and monetizing it, does feel incredibly good, but along the way, there's a lot of pain. Yeah, I talked to you about this once before, how, you know, let's see you're trying to lose weight

as I am continually in this battle. Although with your help and some of the tips about physicality, I was able to drop five pounds for my double-chie. chin to my ass. And I do thank you for that because those tips to take care of your physical body are really running through my mind at all times. I'm like, I could be successful financially maybe. I could be successful as a professor maybe. But if you don't have a body, if you don't have health, you know, that's the highest form of wealth. And to me, looking at it as an experiment, I started to think, well, what if I get one percent better a day? Because, you know, I noted this

when I started reading the book, that the ultimate way to skip the line is to master control over time and space. Einstein was renowned for his gedanken experiments, which you speak fluent German. I know that. I know your favorite word in German language, as is mine, is crankavagen. Do you know what the cranker wagon is, James? No. What does that mean? It's an ambulance. So, you know. There's a lot of, there's a lot of German words, I believe they're German in the chess world. So like, Zugsvang is, you know, a situation where your opponent can't make any move or he'll lose. Right.

There's nowhere to go but down. And I do think about that quite often. But in terms of, you know, these experiments, Godunken experiments, Einstein did 10,000 experiments. He was not an experimental physicist. He was a mind physicist. He was a theoretical physicist. He was a Jewish physicist that Germans considered him too Jewish to do by doing theoretical physics was not manly and was not Aryan. And so they actually forbid German Jews who were doing this type of theoretical physics from winning the Nobel Prize, actually.

This was a big constraint on them. But I started thinking about, well, these 10,000 hours that you talk about, they can compound. And in the compounding of 10,000, by the way, the square root of 10,000, James. 100. So one over 100 is 1%. So you get 1% better every day and you can compound. And by the end of the year, you'll be 37 times better, right? So, but I start thinking, what if I want to lose 1% of my weight, you know, every day or something like that? Let's say you want to lose 10 pounds. And you want to do it 1% a day. And so I started thinking, well, you know, what does that like? And if you go through the math, it turns out, as you know, every time you double something in the exponential growth in this hockey stick curve, you add everything that came before to it. In other words, when you go from two to four, you're adding two plus one plus one before, and you get four. So if you're going to lose 10 pounds in a year, that first five pounds is going to take you basically half a year.

The first, you know, 2.5 pounds is going to take you three months. And the first, you know, the first one and a half pounds or 1.25 pounds, that's going to take you 30 to 40 days. And I started thinking, like, you could drink like a soda and get. gain one pound. So how do you keep your resiliency up during this very slow phase and the initial ascent up the exponential that is the 1% growth rate? I mean, it's hard to quantify it so much like that, like how you just did with weight, but like, because just the same way, like, what does it mean to get 1% better at business every day? What does it mean to get 1% better at tennis every day? But the whole idea is every day you need to be thinking in terms of, you know, like we were talking,

last week about the nature of science. You need to ask questions. What don't move? And then put in, most people don't try to improve every day. They're happy to be, they get their PhD in physics day, or they get a rank in tennis that they're happy with, and then they just play the game, or they just, you know, become a teacher and do their work. But by doing, by asking what you don't know and where you're weak, you could start doing experiments to learn things that maybe nobody knows. So, for instance, in physics, you can ask, well, nobody knows really how the universe began. Why don't they know? Because we don't know really what happened before the cosmic background radiation existed.

So what are experiments to explore that more? And the nature of experiments is that nobody has done it before. See, everybody thinks the 10,000 hour rule is the fastest way to mastery, but it's not. It's actually the slowest way because the 10,000 hour rule mostly involves repetition and then feedback from a coach and then repetition again and then feedback from a coach and so on. And the nature of experiments is let's say you're trying to get better at tennis. Oh, maybe today or let's say you're trying to get better at a stand-up comedy, which is when I was thinking a lot about this 10,000 hour rule.

Well, okay, how about if I do comedy on, I'm going to do an experiment. I'm going to do stand-up comedy on a subway because the audience is guaranteed to be a hostile audience, and you're going to have to be very tight on your punchlines to get people to laugh at all, and you're going to have to get used to a very uncomfortable situations. So now this is a scenario where probably no other comedian is really doing this on their path to learning. They kind of do the same thing every day, and they hope that putting in the 10,000 hours will make them better.

But by doing an experiment, you leapfrog what everybody else knows. You put yourself in a difficult situation and you experiment with ways to do better in that difficult situation. And that instantly, that one experiment could be worth 100 hours, could be worth 500 hours

in the context of the 10,000 hour rule. And it's always great. At any given point, I might have five or six experiments going on in the different areas that I'm interested in because I want to get better at a lot of different things. I'm passionate about a lot of different things. Right. And I can, you know, I'm reading this book through the lens of a physicist, of a scientist,

of an experimental physicist. And always with this image of a theorist, Albert Einstein in my mind, and I couldn't help but think of this a quote from the most famous experiment that really kicked off the era of relativity that we now enjoy and that Einstein benefited it's so much from. He said, of the Michelson Morley experiment, which shout out to Case Western Reserve University, Carnegie Mellons, bitter, arch rival to the West, my alma mater, was done there. And this was the experiment that falsified the concept of the ether. And we'll talk about that in a second. But Einstein called this experiment. He said, if this experiment had not brought us into serious

embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as halfway baked. In other words, the fact that an experiment can be embarrassing is probative. And I like the fact that you say you shouldn't do an experiment unless you could be embarrassed. So talk about that. Talk about the stakes, the skin in the game, as your buddy in Teleb calls it. What about that that is so engendering of quality experimentation for benefit that ultimately leads to, as Einstein called it, redemption? Right. Well, let's say you want to be an entrepreneur.

or let's say you want to be a writer. You have, writing is a good example. You have to do, and physics also is a good example. You have to experiment with things that nobody has ever done before. Part of the reasons you might not know something is because nobody knows it. So if I write an article that somebody else has basically written before, then that's not interesting. Somebody will read the article in my article and say, oh, I already read that.

So and so, Brian Keating has already written about this. So I don't need to read James's version. So with writing and any kind of art or any kind of science, you always have to say, what is interesting to me that I can't read anywhere else? So that by nature is an experiment, because if you write something that no one's ever written before, then it could be the case that no one's interested.

I never hit published on an article unless I'm afraid of what people will think of me. Unfortunately, a lot of the times people think horrible things. of me after I write something, but that also shows the strength of your writing, because what happens when you start doing these experiments and what happens when you say, I want to get, this is, this is the whole reason for the title, skip the line. It's not just how to learn faster and how to monetize faster, but it's because nobody wants you to skip the line. Yeah. If I, hey, everybody, I want to stand-up comedian, or I want to be a computer scientist

or whatever. The first thing people are going to say to me is you can't do that. You need XYZ experience. You need to have been doing this for 10 or 15 years. James, don't expect to skip the line. You've got to pay your dues like the rest of us. And those things have been said to me every single time I've switched passions when I became when I became an entrepreneur after going to, you know, after being an employee at HBO when I started a hedge fund, when I started podcasting, when I started writing books, when I started doing stand-up comedy after all this, people would always say, you can't do that, James. You got to spend, you got to do the 10,000 hours. But I don't want to spend 20 years getting good at something. So the only way, A, nobody wants

you to skip the line because they don't want you to change. If they tell you you can't do it, they just, they can't do it. They don't want you to, they like you being you, the person who's beneath them in some hierarchy. Or that they're in. understand because they have a mental model that they've sunk cost into and they want to say, oh, James is just a podcaster or James is just a stand-up comedian. They don't want to invest the mental calories to reevaluate their assessment and judgment about you. That's how powerful those biases are. Right.

Like if Brian Keating says, hey, I want to do an experiment that will win the Nobel Prize, everyone's going to say to you, Brian, come on, you know the odds of winning the Nobel Prize? Only like so many hundred people have made it out of billions. And that's when someone tells you you can't do something, that's when you should try to do it. Because just the fact that someone is saying that to you means you're probably passionate about it. And then what do you do? You can't just do things that every other physicist did. You have to think of what do people not know?

What do I don't know that I'm really curious about? And I'm willing to put the time and the energy in to do this experiment. And you might start with small experiments. So I wanted to do an experiment on writing in a different format. You know, I've been writing for 30 years, and, you know, there's various formats you could write in. You can write an article that's like letters back and forth between two people. That's called the epistolary form. You can write an article in the second person and the third person and so on.

So I wanted to write in a different format than I usually write. I didn't want to just write in some format that someone else is written in. So I specifically wanted to write about why was Donald Trump tweeting that he wanted to buy Greenland? And then the prime minister of Denmark tweeted back, it's not for sale. First off, I didn't even know you could buy a country. Second, I was just fascinated these world leaders were kind of doing this weird negotiation on Twitter. So I did my research, and I could have just written an article. But instead, what I did was, I wrote it as if it was an article, but I did it as a Kickstarter.

So I wanted to raise $100 million to buy Greenland so that these world leaders can't hog it all. And so I wrote the reasons why, almost like an article, but then I had to come up with all sorts of rewards. You know, if people donate a certain amount, I would make them an Earl or a Duke or make a holiday after them in Greenland or give them, you know, 100 acres of land. And that was an experiment not only in writing, because it was a new format for me, an article written in Kickstarter format, but I had never done a Kickstarter project before. So that was, I learned something brand new

just by doing this article on Kickstarter. And I actually started raising money. Yeah. And I raised over $1,000 within minutes, and Kickstarter shut me down. And so I asked Kickstarter, why'd you do this? And they said, well, we don't really believe you're serious. And we were responsible for the credit card fees

when we return people's money. So I learned something new there. So just by doing an experiment, I learned about Kickstarter, I learned another format for writing, I learned all about Greenland, which I never knew anything about. And that's what experiments do for you.

Plus, you get a story out of it. Right. I'm doing another experiment right now. People told me, you have an obligation to vote. And I said to myself, well, I always thought voting was a right, not an obligation. You have a right to vote, but you also have a right not to vote.

And people said, no, no, no, you can't do that. You have no voice in policy. You should have no voice if you don't vote. And I said, well, there are other ways to have a voice. So I did an experiment. I went to fec.gov, which is the website of the Federal Elections Commission and the government. And if you go there right now and you search for me, I did all the paperwork, and I filed officially to run as a candidate for president in 2024.

And now I'm not really that serious about it. Anybody can do this. Everybody should do it. But now if anyone says to me, you should have no voice in policy, I can say, well, I'm running for president. So maybe I should have a voice. And my theory there is there should be more than one party anyway. And it was interesting to learn how easy it was to file. It's hundreds of people who have filed to run for president. And so I learned something new. And it made me also think about the issues in a different way. Yeah. So it's a win. experiment, they sound funny and they sound kind of weird, but that's the nature of doing thousands of experiments, or hundreds of experiments even, is that it pushes your knowledge

forward and it gives you stories, it gives you information, and it helps you with. But not even just you. I mean, first of all, I want to thank you for making me the Duke of West Asiatt, which, as you know, is the fourth largest city in Greenland. I do enjoy that. and my my 3,900, no, 369 other residents inhabitants of ASEAT, which is appropriate name for me. Thank you. And all the stewardship you've done, your administration.

So it sounds like ASEAT. So so many things to unpack and what you just said. And I can't help but related to, you know, these experiences I've had as an experimental physicist. First of all, one of the worst things you can do is tell somebody that the science, is settled. This is my claim. Yes, we have evidence. Yes, we have other things. But if the science was settled when Isaac Newton was around, you wouldn't have had Einstein, who we keep talking about. We will continue to talk about them. It's impossible not to talk about them. And Feynman used to say, Richard Feynman, most eminent physicist, one of them of the 20th century, used to say science

is the belief in the ignorance of experts. And so what does that mean? I thought experts are supposed to be smart. No, experts can be smart. They have knowledge. They may have wisdom. They may But the ultimate thing is if you tell somebody that you should trust the experts and rely on the experts, then what you're telling them is that no further investigation is needed. No further experiment is needed. And what you've been saying all along about the value of experiments for the experimentalist, him or herself, and I, e. me or you, it actually has a lever effect. Because by you doing an experiment, that relieves me if the experiment is repeatable in principle.

I don't have to do that experiment. In other words, you don't have to do 10,000 light bulb filaments or whatever you talk about in the book about Edison because Edison did that. Now, that frees you up. I always tell this to my students, it's kind of depressing, but like when they solve something and they solve a hugely hard problem in the lab, I'm like, you know, Mazel Tov, now you have earned your ticket to an even harder problem because all the easy, yeah, go ahead. Well, you know, think about, I'm not a tennis player, but for some reason I use tennis. analogies, maybe because the only person I played in the past 10 years was my daughter when she was 12 years old, and I could dominate her on the tennis court when she was 12 years old. But, you know, let's say a tennis player finds that they're always favoring their forehand.

They try to make it so they always hit back with their forehand. Here's an experiment where they push the envelope further for themselves. Why not play a game, a serious game with a friend of yours or whatever, where you're always hitting with your backhand. So this is an experiment for you. There's really no downside to it. You might still win the game. Your worst case scenario is you lose a game.

But the upside is that you get a, you become 1% much more well-rounded as a player, and your one experiment makes you a better tennis player. And so all of these experiments, so whatever you're trying to get better at, let's say you'd like to get better at sales. okay uh you know try to when in your next sales meeting try different techniques try being as quiet as possible that's an experiment try just asking questions of of the client or try asking him

or her for advice so like uh you know they ask you well what are you selling me and instead of just responding like anxiously here's what i'm selling i hope you like it just say well what do you need and I'll tell you if I have anything. Like get out of your comfort zone. Like that could be very uncomfortable for many people. Or, you know, I always think in terms of games, because that's a fun area to experiment. Let's say you're a very, this is a game that happened to me once in chess. I was playing the U.S. women's champion and I was winning. This was when I was 18 years old. And I got so scared because she was, you know, a strong player and I was winning and I didn't want to blow it. I offered a draw, and she instantly accepted and then just walked away.

And I did an experiment after that, which is I am never going to offer a draw again, or at least for the next so many games that I'm better at. And the experimenter, the downside is you might lose some more games. And the downside is really not that bad. It costs you nothing, and it makes you a better player, because you'll play more, you'll be in more situation. that are stressful for you, and you figure out how to reduce that stress, how to increase your energy in those situations, and so on. And it made me a better player. So just to remind people

we're talking to James Altutcher on Clubhouse simultaneously with recording for the release of his phenomenal book, which comes out Tuesday, February 23rd, which is when we'll release this video. Do me a favor and order this book, pre-order this book. We want this book to blow up. This is James's greatest book in history, which is actually saying. a lot because you've changed, you know, millions of people's lives, James, for the better. You've changed my life. You've made me a better person, a better father, better podcaster, and not yet a better chess player because you keep trounce. You and I will play one of these days once I get my ranking above the logarithm. I'm happy to give you a lesson. So one of the,

one of the techniques in the book, so in the book, I list all these techniques, including what I call the 10,000 experiment rule. But to be honest, it's more like a 200 experiment rule. I really feel if you do about 200 experiments in whatever it is that you're interested in getting better at, you'll be in the top 1% in the world. And that's because, by the way, sorry to interrupt you, but that's because of your other rule, which is idea sex. So 100 times 100 is 10,000. We talk in the book, you talk in the book, actually 200 times 200 will get you 10,000

individual, unique pairs of experiments or more than that. So actually, yeah, you're right. You only need the 100 by 100 to get 10,000 of order 10,000 pairs, which, then lead to this great blossoming exponentially so in growth. Go ahead. Yeah, you know, I never thought of it that way, but that's really true. Like, look at the Greenland experiment, for instance. That was a result of combining my writing skills with, you know, the research I did on Greenland for this one thing with Kickstarter.

So now I have, I got, I didn't just get one percent better at writing. I got one percent better at understanding kick. So I got a lot better at understanding Kickstarter because those initial experiments that you do with something are worth a lot more when you're in the learning curve. And I learned about an entire country, which is not really a country, I found out. But that's one of the things I learned. And but, you know, another technique, I have lots of, first off, I appreciate you saying that about skip the line, that it's my best book ever.

I think it is too because this book has real, it's not like a BS. self-help book. It has real technique. Everything is the technique that I've used and people who have been on my podcast, including yourself, have used to become top in their field. And by that, I mean not just the skills, but monetizing, because that's really important. It's one thing to be in the sports space, but it's another thing. It's very difficult to monetize it. And, you know, one of the techniques in the book I talk about is a technique told to me by Frank Shamrock, who was for 10 years like the MMA world champion. And it's called plus minus equal.

And that's where you get someone to teach you lessons. That's the plus. The equals is you use your peer group to bounce ideas back and forth. And the minus is you're not really good at something unless you can explain it simply, unless you can teach it. So obviously, you know this as a physicist. You had professors and teachers who taught you a lot that you. you know, then you have peers that you bounce ideas off of. And of course, scientists are also

teachers and you have students. So a few months ago, I decided to purely test my ideas by, once again, I haven't studied chess in 23 years. I've gotten a lot worse since my peak. And so I decided I'm going to study the game using the techniques in skip the line. I got myself a plus, I got myself equals, and I got myself a minus. I'm giving some lessons out just to have that minus. I completely switch the way I play. So I'm doing the 10,000 experiments. And I'm doing various, you know, I have a technique called spoke and wheel in the book where you don't just do one thing. You do many things in the area that you're interested in so that you see different angles of the subject. So in addition to playing, I'm also, you know, streaming it occasionally

and doing other things. So, or if you're interested in sports, you could, or if you're interested in finance. You could do write a book, you could do a podcast, you could do a newsletter, you could start a hedge fund. Those are different spokes of the same deal. And in science, it's important to do all of those to become well-rounded. Yeah. And so many of the experiments that you talk about really resonate with me. Again, speaks to the quality of the book and the vision of the author that it can apply. I mean, it's kind of weird that it appeals so much to an experimental astrophysicist like me, a humble one at that. But, you know, of course, all the skills and I followed you for the better part of almost two decades now or at least a 15 years,

14 years, and that it resonates with me in my audience, you know, pretty nerdy and like me, like to geek out on physics. This book is replete with references and kind of highlights of some of the greatest names in physics history. And I want to talk about my friend who is very, my hero, rather. I wish he'd be my friend. Actually, I'm doing an experiment again. inspired by you, to create artificial intelligent Galileo, which I'm calling GAIO. And that will be part of the spoke system supporting the hub or the wheel, which is my Galileo homage, in part, going to be generated by Galileo's dialogue, which is the book that influenced me most as a scientist, influenced a man by the name of Albert Einstein the most.

And this book is one of the most important books in human history. and it doesn't have an audio book. So no one's ever done an audio book in the history of the world. And I figured, I'm going to do it, but I need permission. I need to find out who owns the rights to the translation. I'm not going to translate it. And then you were just like, just do it. Just do it.

Ask for permission later. First ask for forgiveness, which explains why I got you got you on Clubhouse. You didn't know I was going to do this. I figured, if he doesn't want to do it, I will say sorry, James. I didn't know it. But it was an experiment. No, I'm always open for a good experiment. episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably

multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the Dream. So now James, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's just about Galileo just to finish off about that. So now I've got people around the world, including one of the greatest physicists alive today, an Italian by the name of Carlo Rovelli, and he's offering to read a third of the Galileo's dialogue book. So much has attention as is getting that if you go to the small site that sells your book,

after you buy James's book, skip the line and all of his books, you will type in my name, Brian Keating. and it says it comes up, Brian Keating, Galileo. In other words, people are already searching for this book. There's a thirst, there's a hundred. And I didn't write the book. I'm just doing the experiment that you commissioned me to do as my PI. So, and here's the interesting thing. It's not like you had to spend a year doing the audiobook before you conclude if the experiment

works or not. When I said, okay, just do it. It probably took you a few hours to find out, maybe even less, to find out who had the rights, send them an email, get an email back, and they said, sure. And then it took you another couple hours to think, okay, well, it would be interesting if there's a bunch of different voices and it can't hurt me to ask Carlo Rovelli.

The downside is he says, no, the upside is one of the most famous physicists in the world reads the book in Galileo's voice and he's Italian, no less. So it probably just took you a couple hours to set the stage. And guess what? It's not 1% improvement.

You're considered one of the world's experts on Galileo now. And you will be even more so as the book finishes and comes out. So that's the benefit of this. I did an experiment a few months ago. I suggested to a friend of mine, Charlamagne the guy who has a host, the radio show, The Breakfast Club of New York, has like 10 million listeners a day. I suggested, took me an hour or so.

I outlined an idea for a book. I thought he should write. And it was an experiment to just send it to him and say, I don't need to be involved. You should write this book on racism. And now he asked me to be involved. I even said no to that at first, but then we agreed to work together on it. And March 31st,

probably the top book in the world on racism will be coming out. You know, partly, you know, it's by Charlemagne with me. And some of these experiments, if the upside happens, it could be huge. If the downside happens, if the experiment doesn't work, you set up the experiment,

like I'm sure you set up your science experiments, You set up the experiment, so you've learned fairly quickly if it's got merit, if it's going to work or not, and then you can continue the experiment more. Exactly. And you talk about Galileo specifically in the book. You say Galileo didn't listen to the received wisdom of thousands of years of a guy by the name of Aristotle. You know, he may be known to some of the listeners out there who said that heavier things fall faster than lighter ones. Galileo decided to do an experiment to take this out. He dropped the apocryphly.

We think he dropped the heavy object, a light object, off the. Leaning Tarapisa, whether or not he did it is almost less important than the idea that he could do it. And you say in the book, and skip the line, you say Galileo's experiment met all five criteria of a good experiment. It was easy. It was low risk. Its potential was huge. It hadn't been done before.

And no matter what, he would learn something through this one experiment. Not only did Galileo overturned 2,000 years of thinking, correcting the knowledge of Aristotle, who's considered unimpeachable in his intelligence, but he also became. known as the father of modern physics, the scientific method, and the 10,000 experiments rule catapulted him to the front of the line. It's just so good. Yeah, and if you think about it, people probably said to him, Galileo, are you kidding me? Aristotle, you think in the past 1,500 years, somebody would have questioned one of the greatest minds in history? What makes you think you, after 2,000 years, it's going to come up with something new? And it's,

It took him all of 15 minutes to do that experiment. And so all the time people are being told you can't. Many people, and this is not a critique of people, but many people are civilians. They have responsibilities, mortgage kids, I do as well, and they want to meet those responsibilities. So they do what they need to do to get by and so on. But when you're a scientist of yourself, and I'm not talking about life. But if you're a scientist of yourself and you want to get better at something, you have to get better skills and you have to get better at understanding the field that you're in. So you do experiments to do that. Like, again, the Greenland experiment, imagine writing a whole novel now. That's a Kickstarter. That's in Kickstarter format. I did a little experiment to sort of say that, oh, maybe this is interesting. And it did turn out to be interesting. A lot of people, not only did people start donating money,

but people were saying, oh, this is unusual. What a weird thing to do a Kickstarter to raise $100 million to buy a country. And it's well written. So I even met a different audience for my stuff than usual by doing a little experiment. So all of these experiments have been interesting. There was one time during the early stages of the economic lockdown, I thought to myself, well, nobody's wearing suits anymore. and I'm just wearing pajamas all day long

because by definition, they're the most comfortable clothes. Why not wear them outside? And I started wearing pajamas on planes. I started doing stand-up comedy in pajamas. I started going to other people's, you know, meeting people for dinner in pajamas. Just to see maybe there's potential here

to design a clothing line, something I've never done before, that's outer wear, but pajamas, you know, idea sex a little bit. And it didn't really work out. I didn't really find people were that interested in it. You head, you talk a lot in this book about risk management. I want to go there next.

We on these large projects like the Simon's Observatory, like Bicep 2, which I talk about extensively in losing the Nobel Prize, we deal with what are called risk registers. These are basically simple probabilistic estimates of both the likelihood of an event occurring. The Chilean peso will fluctuate to our disadvantage against the U.S. dollar. And since we pay labor and concrete and gasoline instead of her in Chile, where the telescope is located at 17,200 feet above sea level, that's a risk that, you know, is known to have some volatility.

It can happen. There are other risks. A global pandemic can take place. My advisor, father figure, mentor, can commit suicide. These are things that happen. And these are the things that are the, you know, again, the title of Nicholas Nassim Teleb's books tells you everything they're all about, as you point out. this book. I love this book is like a meta-analysis of Nicholas Taleb at one point,

but the black swans are the most impactful, the hardest to predict. How do you maintain that not, I know you're not like a huge fan of like resiliency and grit, but rather another one of his books, anti-fragility. How do you deal with something like that? Like my advisor committed suicide. I was in a deep depression for months and I can't let it, you know, percolate down. God forbid, someone that works with me and sees me as a mentor or father figure does something. So how do you deal with those existential risks, which almost by definition can't be forecast? I mean, first off, I'm very sorry about, you know, I remember reading that in the book, in your book about losing Nobel Prize, about your mentor committing suicide. That's not quite in the category of an experiment, but let's say an experiment doesn't work.

And looking at everything as an experiment other than the life and death of peers and so on. But looking at everything you do as an experiment helps you to be anti-fragile. So just to be clear, people think resiliency is the key to success. Like you're persistent despite things going bad. But that's not quite true. It's anti-fragility, as Nassim Taleb points out, which is you become stronger from failure, not just resilient from failure. And the whole idea is if you view everything as an experiment, no matter what you're

The report's case scenario in the experiment thing. It's like Thomas Edison said. A reporter asked him, what does it feel like to fail 10,000 times when he tried to make the first light bulb? And he said, I didn't fail 10,000 times. I found out 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb. And by viewing everything as an experiment, you're able to say, well, this didn't work out, but what did I learn from it?

Because that's how you move the 1% forward. If, let's say I'll use chess as an example, let's say you play a game of chess and you lose. I know people who get so upset at themselves, they throw the pieces, they're sore losers. Heck, I've been like that. Me too. I'm the person who threw the pieces. I do it at a chessboard. That's how I compound.

I do idea sex with my anger. Yeah, that's violent idea sex. But with chess, it's really important to animal. your losses. Like, oh, I just lost. This is a great example to never lose. I'm going to make sure I never lose like this again. So you study, you spend just five minutes, 10 minutes, studying the game. Then you turn on the computer and you have the computer analyzed. So you study it again. Just analyze it twice. And you will be literally 1% better at chess for doing that every time you really analyze one of your games. Same thing with a business. Same thing with a sale that didn't

go through. Same thing with investing. Now, here's the thing about risk management. If you're doing something that a lot of people love, let's say you have a passion, see you're passionate about writing, or let's say you want to make money investing, the rewards are there. People have made money through investing, for instance. We know that there are rewards in doing this. It's not like every investor loses all their money. But since you know the rewards are there, your only job, really, is it's about 1% reward, 99% risk. Because if you can stay in the game, you win the game.

All you need to do is stay in the game. But because the game is always changing and people are the best players in the game are always improving, whether it's investing or science or writing or comedy or whatever, you need to constantly be experimenting and improving. Like, oh, I, look at Warren Buffett's a great example. He's known as a value investor. To be honest, he hasn't really done value investing since, I don't know, the 1960s or 70s.

He has many, many styles of investing that he's experimented with. Don't forget, this is the man who said he would, he said he would never buy technology stocks. He owns Apple stock. His first big tech investment was Amazon. He lent them hundreds of millions of dollars. So he was always willing to experiment with things that he was deeply uncomfortable with in order to become the best investor in the world.

And that's really what you have to do. In comedy, if you tell great jokes, that's fine. How about now the characters in your jokes play around with doing different voices for each one? Because guess what? That's Louis C.K. experiment with that. And those are his funniest jokes now. Right. So, you know, I look at your book and I say, you know, this, this experiment.

that you talk about with, with, you know, failing experiments, you know, with whatever that means, because it's not even clear, as you point out again and again, there's no, like, since there's no one skill called stand-up comedy or astrophysicist or, you know, or, you know, chess player or whatever, there's no one skills. It's this compendium of microskills. You, by definition, can't fail because you are more than the sum of those parts, the combinatoric parts. And you talk about in the book, an experiment you did in Twitter, which we're going to replicate in a, few minutes on Clubhouse. So I am now repeating an experiment you did with a technology that was in its infancy called Twitter, and I am now doing it in Clubhouse. And I'm going to do another

thing, which you did, which is when you reached out to Costello, who was the CEO, early CEO of Twitter. And he ended up writing the forward to choose yourself. And you asked him, you sent him all these ideas. Well, guess what we're going to do, James? You and I are going to send ideas to the CEO of Clubhouse, whoever the hell that is, and see if we can get. in on their early valuation round. We'll spread that money out amongst all the people that are in this room as of right now. Jay, take a screenshot. Whatever upside we get, we are going to spread out 1% to those people, 98% James and me. But anyway, you talk about it and you say that you talk about one experiment, change your life forever, even though it could be viewed as a total failure.

When you learn, you earn. Every experiment you learn from will allow you to skip the line. I thought about this. I did a quick, you know, this is one of my experiments. I did a quick, Google search. If you take the words, the best thing that ever happened to me, if you just take those words and you ask the following question of Google, what two words precede those five words most frequently in writing online in the English language? And you know what you get? What two words I failed? Or like, I was fired. And I talk about this in losing the Nobel Prize. Getting fired from the most prestigious university on earth from Stanford University led me in direct fashion to skip whatever lines would have been in my way to having this conversation with you,

to being married to my wife, to having my children. I would not have had that had I not been fired. And even though at the time, I didn't think it was the worst. I was kind of grateful to get fired. I didn't get along with the boss I was working with at the time. But then things got put in motion. She helped me out. I got set up and the rest took care of itself through a lot of hard work. But that notion that almost everybody, James, says, you know, of a failure, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. and yet we fear failure. Why is it? Why is it that we don't have that panoptic, synoptic view in the moment that, shoot, you know,

okay, failure, okay, that's part of it. Yeah. It's going to lead to it. Why is it so hard to get over that mental model of failure as ultimate destruction? It's a really great question because we know intellectually that failure is a learning experience. If you ask anyone, they will say failure is a potential learning experience. But why do we fear it so much? It's because, you know, we've been in modern society for, let's say,

a couple hundred years. You can even argue a couple thousand years. But the human species has been around for two million years. And we haven't really been evolving that our brain has not evolved since then. Our brain still thinks we're in a tribe of 30 people at best. And when you fail, it releases a neurochemical that signals, hey, buddy, you might get kicked out of the tribe. And if you're kicked out of the tribe, nobody can survive on their own in the woods. You're going to get eaten by a lion.

So that cortisol is an immensely powerful neurochemical. It's like a drug in the system. Oh, hey, James. Yeah. So now you're talking. So we're talking about experiments that we want to do like you did with Twitter. and we want to do these, you know, and then give Clubhouse some ideas for free,

and then we'll see if we can make it better. So the first step is getting you involved, getting you online, and getting you some followers so that you'll have this massive base. You went from zero to 106 followers instantaneously. And, you know, Jay says, it's interesting. Clubhouse. It took me two years to earn, you know, 2,000 followers on Twitter. It probably took me two years or at least a year on YouTube.

It took me, I still just barely got above 2000 on Instagram. I don't spend that much time there. But Clubhouse, it took me literally, James, it took me six days to get to 2000 followers. There's something either happening in Twitter, and it'll be interesting to get your viewpoint on it, where they're suppressing followers or something like that, or there's something unique about Clubhouse that has this dramatic reach. What do you think it would be? Do you think that like the other platforms are censoring or something else?

Yes, I think the algorithms have gotten. very harsh. Like I noticed even when somebody was tweeting the cover of my book, it said may contain sensitive material, the cover of my book, which is a very innocent looking cover. So I don't know what's up with the Twitter algorithm. But newer social media apps like Clubhouse and even TikTok have much more sophisticated algorithms about showing people, other people that they might be potentially interested in following.

And they're very good at like very quickly experimenting in the, algorithm, almost like many focus groups that take seconds to see which people are attracted to which type of people. Yeah. And they're constantly changing the Brian Keating algorithm of who you might be interested in to make it better and better. And it's very sophisticated. Same thing with TikTok.

It's much more sophisticated than Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, which is why you might not even have a lot of followers, but be exposed to a lot of content that you don't follow. And to see, they learn by seeing who you're interested. sit in who you spend time with and so on. So Clubhouse could be doing that as well, but I would say one experiment that people could do to improve their Clubhouse

followers is organize events. So like, I'm thinking of doing a podcast for 10 straight hours where I'm convinced everyone has a story to tell. So instead of a podcast where you interview like just famous people

or whatever, anybody can just sign up on Clubhouse and I'll do a 10-hour podcast and I'll interview anybody who randomly raises their hand on Clubhouse and says, hey, interview me. And the experiment in a little bit is proving everyone has a story worthy of telling from the random person on the street to the most famous person ever. And if I use Clubhouse to do that, I'll get Clubhouse followers. Yeah. Just like how I used to do Q&As on Twitter.

I was just going to say that. Yeah, you did a Q&A on Twitter. You're the first real person to implement that. Now I view Clubhouse is kind of like the benefit over Twitter is like you shouldn't. I mean, you shouldn't drive at all, James. Let's be honest. You basically are a menace to society on the roads. But you could use Clubhouse on the road.

It's perfectly safe. It's just put on hands-free mode. And I've done it while I was supposed to be, you know, talking, interacting with my children. But, you know, there's only one, you know, I've got a couple children. And so, you know, there's plenty of them to go on. But actually, thinking about Clubhouse, you know, and keeping it open as this two-way communication, first of all, people, I want to give people a chance to speak to James Altucher.

Let's get some questions for James here. We have Harveen, who I've done for a little while, only through Clubhouse. A lot of these people I've only met you in Clubhouse. So Harveen, do you have any comments, questions? Camelia, you have any comments or questions for James Alpiture? There's one in all. Yes. Just a quick comment on compounding.

I mean, I appreciate the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, but you could be compounding mistakes too. So I just think that in some areas just departing from what's come before. Right. That's the nature of constructing things as an experiment, as opposed to the 10,000-hour rule, which I'm simplifying the 10,000-hour rule, but it's a lot about repetition and just keep on repeating in action

until while you get better at it. But that could be a way that you're repeating bad habits. Experiments are something that happened that you do in the world to see if the world responds the way you think it might, and it either will or it won't. So it's not really about compounding bad habits. It's about learning the good and the bad. And you're going to do that from experimenting

because the real world is going to give you the feedback. this piece about Greenland on it quickly learned that oh Kickstarter doesn't like this but the writing people thought it was an interesting idea and I learned about Greenland I did an experiment that improved never seen a comedian do before

it was an experiment the downside is I'm going to get food the upside is people are going to laugh hysterically and I find something new that nobody's ever done every single time I've performed some of them work right away Some people hate it.

People think what the hell is this guy doing on stage? And you learn really quickly. So it's not about habits as much as getting kind of feedback from the world. At what temperature, water turns into steam. It's not about learning a habit. I'm going to learn the exact temperature from a liquid into steam. Thanks so much, James. James, just one other quick question on writing and selecting subjects to write about,

See something keeps your curiosity and writing about it would increase people's insight into that problem. And you had the time, you know, setres parables, right? Is there something that would stop you from writing it, like some kind of externality that would make you pull back and say, no, I don't want to? Yes, only one thing, though. So again, I don't hit publish unless I'm afraid of what people will think of me. And so I don't mind hurting myself in my writing. but I will never write something that hurts another person. So that's a rule.

The one rule I've really stuck to over the past 20 years. But there's no topic off limits. I remember one time I did an experiment on TechCrunch, which is a popular blog about Silicon Valley. I would say five, six years ago, was the most popular blog about Silicon Valley. And everybody would write about Apple or Google or write these very technical or drugs.

articles. So I wrote an article about my first business and my customer and how I got the customer and so on. But then at the end, I just mentioned at the end in this article that he had this secretary who had a scar all the way down the side of her face. And my last line was, I wish I could, I wish just once I had licked the scar right off her face. Not a line you usually see in a, a blog about entrepreneurship or investing or business. And people were like, what the hell did I just read? But it was an experiment to be a little bit more literary and appealing in a mostly dry sort of blog. And it worked really well.

And I started doing all the time. At one point, the CEO of AOL, which owned TechCrunch, even called me, Tim Anderson, and said, I always know when you're writing because the page is for the entire psycho op. Let's see. Camelia, do you have any comments or questions for James? Yeah, sure. Thank you. I'd like to say thanks James so much for your last year's IG Live during lockdown. Oh, you're welcome. Encourage me to write my first English novel and self-published on Amazon. Thank you. Oh, you're very welcome. And, you know, that was a series of experiments.

So those IG lives, I had never done them before. And then I started converting them into podcasts. and that was an experiment and they did even better than my usual podcast. And then I encouraged people to experiment with writing. So I came up with these sort of book writing experiments where you can write a book in a month. And I came with very simple formulas to write a very interesting, what I thought would be very interesting books. And hundreds of people ended up writing their first books. So I'm really glad you were one of them.

Yeah, thank you. I got a question about the creator. economy, as you know, maybe, I mean, during lockdown, a lot of individuals, they start to like just work for themselves. But do you think in the future there will be a creator economy, like companies invest in individuals on the creator themselves? Absolutely. And you know, that very question is fascinating because, again, this always goes back to the fact that questions are much more important than answers. You ask the question because you don't really know the answer. And so the answer could lead you down a pathway that

could generate huge success. Let's just make it up. Let's just brainstorm a little bit. Imagine somebody graduates college but can't pay back their student loan debt, which is a common occurrence? What if we set up an exchange where 10% of that individual's income he sells or she sells on an exchange for the next 20 years? So I can people, investors can bid to own 10% of this person's future income. And he or she states, well, I'm a lawyer. I'm going to do this, this, this, I'm also going to make these paintings and people can decide how much they're going to spend for 10% of the income. And this way the person could generate cash

to start paying back the student loan debt as opposed to, you know, waiting over years of work to pay back to student loan debt. I like it. I like it because then I will encourage more people to go to college and that's bolstering my salary. That's awesome. Everything's coming up, Brian.

Exactly. Which is a good way to make, too. Everybody does think of their self-intention. Now, but also related to this question, It's very interesting because creators think that the only thing they need to get good at is creating. So often writers will write huge novels and nobody will read them. Or entrepreneurs will have great ideas, but no one will invest. And because this is the real world and I didn't want to just do again some BS self-help book that doesn't actually work,

A very important chapter in this book is about persuasion because you have to be able to persuade others that your experiments and your skill set and things you create are interesting. And persuasion, you know, there are many books about persuasion. I've read them. They don't work. Like there's all these techniques. I've tried on mirror someone's actions and they'll agree with everything you say. There's all these techniques I try that don't work. So I specifically write about techniques.

that have worked over and over for me, like magically, I've created literally millions of dollars for me that I know work every time. And persuasion is such an important part of getting good at the field that you're in. Not just the skills of that field, but the practical aspects of monetizing in that field. So this is why if someone created an exchange for the creator economy where people could invest individuals, the individual has to be able to be persuasive enough that they are worth investing in. So that's why persuasion is an important part of skipping the line. If I want to go on the stage at the stand-up comedy club, I have to somehow persuade the booker that I am a good risk if I'm a brand-new comedian and on not.

That's great. You just persuade me to buy a book. That's part of the idea. Thank you. I'll give you one persuasion technique from the book that I, And it's just like amazing for me. So let's say you're asking your boss for a raise. And you're really nervous. Everybody's nervous asking their boss for a raise.

You go in and you say you want to raise. You've been working really hard. You've been doing a good job. You want to raise. And the boss says, I don't know. We're not really giving a lot of raises this year. The economy's bad. You know, well, how much you, what kind of raise do you want?

How much more money do you want? here's here's a great technique that I call the advice technique. You say to the boss, listen, I've been, my heads down to the ground. Like I've been working really hard. You're like the grandmaster at negotiation. I've really respected you not just as a boss, but as a friend. So just pretend you're just helping me out. I need your advice.

Since you're an expert in this, how should I ask you for a, raise. Jay, you're listening to this, Jay? Jay, you listening to this? Yeah, he's nodding. He's nodding. Jay, I'm a sucker. Jay, every time Jay asked her raise, I always just give it. But, you know, the advice technique has worked for me so much, even selling companies for millions of dollars. So an acquire will say, well, how much do you want for your business? And I say, look, I've been focused on building the business. You've bought a thousand companies. I'm just asking, I want to work with you, I want to be acquired by your company. You tell, if we're going to be partners, give me good advice.

How should I think about valuing my company? They're going to give you. First, they're going to be happy you gave them status in that way. Second, they're not going to give you bad advice because you just told them. One of the reasons you admire them is because they're an expert on this. They're going to give you a good advice. And then if you follow their own advice, they're not going to say no after that. So the technique is like magic.

It works every time. Zeb. Zev is a physicist, and he's going back to school at age 47, James, to get his PhD in physics, which you are working on as well in the correspondence course that I offer here at UCST. Zev. It was also Zeb's birthday. He shares a birthday this week with Galileo, Galilei, who we mentioned in Skipto-Ly. Is a prominent figure.

So, Zev, any questions for the man who? who's reinvented himself again and again and always never fails to not undo the effect of not failing to choose himself. Yeah. You know, at 47, I'm 53 now, at 47, I suddenly decided I wanted to do stand-up comedy and, you know, among the other things that I do. And everyone told me, you can't do this. It's going to take you 20 years.

You're going to be 67 before you get on stage. and the more people told me I couldn't do something, I had to do it. And I studied every comedian. I skipped the line a little bit by having all great comedians on my podcast so I could ask them questions and interview them. And whenever happens to me the night before on stage, I would ask them on my podcast the next day.

And, you know, I essentially skipped the line. I didn't care that people told me I couldn't do it. I knew I would be able to do it. And now I've been touring all over the world. I mean, when there isn't an economic lockdown. And so congratulations on pursuing a passion at the age of 47, no matter how many people told you, you can't do this, but you're doing it. Yeah. So first, I would like to, you know, I'm not famous with my wife, Rina.

You probably know her. Rina Freeman once. Yeah. She interviewed Robin. Robin's first podcast ever was with his wife. That's wife. Yeah, I've been on her podcast. Yeah, yeah.

So I wanted to get friends to her. Oh, she's in. You know, I did this before. Five years old. There's no way you'll get into UC Berkeley for an undergraduate visit because UCBerklee make the same plate again, you know. Yeah, I mean, I can't. I mean, when I, for, I wanted to start a hedge fund in 2003.

And I asked my neighbor who was in a business, you know, can I do this? Would you, would you invest some money with me? And he's like, I don't know how to say this, James, but you can't do this. You have to go to get an NBA, then work at Goldman Sachs for a while, they work at a big hedge fund. And then maybe if you have something you need to offer, you can start investing for other people and maybe start a hedge fund. And I needed to make money.

I didn't want to wait. So I just, I experimented with different strategies. At the time, not a lot of people were doing what Brian's friends. and Jim Simons does, which is write computer software to analyze statistically the stock markets. So I did that. And it worked out very well for me. I kept track of all my trading and stuff. And I showed my track record to hundreds of people. And out of hundreds of people, 10 invested. And I had a hedge fund. So I offered something unique first, which is the last part of what my friend was telling me to do. Rather than going to Goldman Sachs and hedge funds, I just read every book I could do.

programs from software, tested thousands of ideas. I did tons of experiments. Some experiments worked, most didn't. And the experiments that worked got me in business. And then I sent emails to hundreds of people saying, I'm using artificial intelligence and software to model the markets. This is my track record. Can we at least meet?

And then one out of ten would meet, and one out of ten of those would invest money with me. And then I skip the line. I've had a hedge fund within a few months. Oh, Rina's here. Hey, Rina. Do you want to say hi to James? Wish him a happy pub day coming up?

She did on Twitter. Hi, Rina. Nice to see you. Hi. I'm excited to vote for you for president. Yes. You know, you should run for president. Everybody listening to this is go to FPC.gov and run for president.

That's the ultimate exercising your civic responsibility, right? If everyone should vote, then everyone should run. You know, and politics is like the essence of persuasion skills. Unfortunately, because people, the very good persuaders often have no backbone behind or no real solidity behind what they're persuading about. But, you know, I, what inspired me to sign up at f-acc.gov was I was in this debate about whether one should vote or not. And I saw that most people trying to debate were very poor at under

understanding persuasion. Like they would just start insulting me or they would start doing what's called a false equivalence. They would say, well, if you don't vote, then you're a racist. And I was saying, well, I'm happy to debate about racism. So this is a technique called labeling. So what are we really, you say, what are we really talking about here? Are you, are we talking about if voting, what voting means over the past 250 years and

whether it wants to vote or not, or are we debating about racism? because I'm happy to do that as well, but that wasn't what I thought the debate was about. So labeling what somebody is doing is a good way to shut them up if they're not making any sense. That's another technique in the book. A powerful one. Timmy, you're up on this. Oh, who is that? That's a real quick question.

James, what's your recommendation for us who are not old enough to run for president but are still vehemently conscientiously objecting? Yeah, I think there's lots of things you can do. Again, there's the whole spoke and wheel of content. Let's say your wheel is political objection. There's newsletters, books, podcasts, there's working for a campaign, there's starting a new party and finding someone to run for that party and finding people to donate to that party. That sounds like an extreme, but you just, it's okay to have extremes also in this. And many people do the smallest thing, which is they just argue on Twitter, which is totally useless. But having, it was stunning to me in this past election how everybody, there was only two menus

served, and you had to order everything on one menu or order everything on the other menu. So for instance, if you loved hydroxychloroquine, it also somehow magically meant you were in favor of lowering taxes. And if you hated hydroxychloroquine, you wanted to raise taxes. Two things aren't correlated, but it was amazing how all the Republicans believed one way and all Democrats believe this other way. So why isn't everybody running for president? And then maybe there should be some online way to vote for any of thousands of candidates, potentially, and everybody should be able to express their views. So I'm also an objective. I'm an objective to the entire system, not as an anarchist, but just that everybody should express their opinions.

And I don't think enough people do that. Here's another experiment I like to do. Argue both sides of something. So this is called steel manning your argument. I'm vehemently pro-choice, for instance. But my business partner is religiously pro-life. And I steel-manned by argument, meaning I could probably argue the pro-life side better than he can. So once you steal man in an argument, another great suspicion technique is if their argument slips, you can say, listen, I hear what you're saying, but there's a better way to convince me about your stance, which is to do this, this, and this.

Because I've been able to argue, I'm able to do that because I'm able to argue their side better than they can. And that's an important technique that most political people never do. I have a question. How on earth, in the middle of the pandemic, were you able to write this book with everything that you're going on, your parenting with Robin Five Kids, you move to Florida, how do you do it? Well, you sort of make sure everything requires energy. And you just have to make sure, you almost have to do an audit of how you spend your energy. Do you spend your energy worrying about relatives think about you?

Do you spend your energy worrying about what parties you're invited to? Do you spend your energy worrying about, is this a good business idea? Maybe I should raise money for it. Well, try not raising money for it. Try to start the idea without raising money. For a book, what I would do first is, this is what I do for every book, is that I find lots of articles I've written. I literally staple them together

and that's a first that's a zero draft. It's not a book yet, but it looks like a book. It's like 300 pages of words I've written. And then I rewrite everything and, you know, a book goes through like 20 drafts, but that's a good way to start to give you like energy and make you feel like you're accomplishing things.

And then it's just a matter of, you know, rewriting and owning different points. But it was hard because before the lockdown, I was five nights a week performing stand-up comedy, which was taking a lot of energy. That's like five, six hours a night. And I wasn't writing the book like I should have been. So once I stopped spending energy on comedy,

now after I've done, you know, did hundreds of podcasts in 2020. I wrote two books. I did, I started a business. I did other things. After my New York City is dead article, I did get a little burnt out from all the reaction. I got in New York City. I mean, to have Jerry Seinfeld trash you for an entire page in the New York Times

showed me that, A, my persuasion ability was enough to rile him up a little bit, but B, I just had so many people angry at me. I got a little burned out. I turned that to my advantage. I use that to say, okay, I'm going to experiment with my own book. I'm going to use the skip the line techniques to get better than I ever was at chess, even though I haven't studied it in 23 years. and right now I'm probably right back at the peak of where I was in the 90s

and now I've got to push a little more to get better but I'm there and I just use the techniques in the book super impressive you are just so amazing and your resiliency is so inspiring and I'm definitely going to use your techniques what do you think about James D? let me know let me know how it goes and you do I will. Yeah, we all got to support Cammy.

She is one of the reasons I stay on Twitter, Cammy. You can mute your volume, but you do give me help that this platform can be used for good and convinced me to use Clubhouse, along with Jay, that you guys really show that there's a good side to it. And even my wife, who's not on any social media, you know, she gets mad when I'm on Clubhouse. And James Gill, you know, I know you needed another addiction. So that's why Jay and I conspired to get you on here. But the bottom line is it is addictive.

The arena told me that it will. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, it's a good addictive because being burnt out and rationalizing that I'm using the skip align techniques to get better at chess, that has become an addiction. And I need another addiction to wean myself off this one. Yeah, and your needle drug habit. But the smoking crack fires, exactly. Let's see, Yosey, you haven't said anything.

Yossi, do you have anything to add? You're up on stage. Hey, my James. So I just like to give an example of how I skipped the line and chose myself, maybe a bit of certain different differences, how you pronounce it. First of all, I've been following James for many years. I don't know, 15 years or so. Oh, thank you. I remember when you had a show with Stephen Dubner.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that was back of the day. So at that time, I think maybe you still do it, but you had published your cell phone number and you said, you know, send me questions. Or maybe it wasn't before then. I lost track. But you had done a, you know, you speak a lot about that credit card metrics and the credit score is a BS metric. Yes. And during that episode, you actually went to a commercial break and you had a credit card card. Credit karma.

And I texted you about it and you actually phoned me. And you called me to tell me that you're right, that this had slipped through the crack somehow and you did not believe in what credit karma is selling. And you stood behind your opinion about the whole credit rating system. So I just, so since then I actually had your cell phone number. And I, when I got into Clubhouse, it says, who do you think would be a great addition to Clubhouse?

So I went through my friends, and they won't be such great additions to Clubhouse. Let's be honest. But who's a man who has a strong voice and an innovator? So I figured, hey, James Alton Show, let me invite you. Yeah, so thank you so much for inviting me. I think it was your invite, actually, that... So there you go.

And I was like, there's no way he didn't get an invite from somebody else before. But now I am actually on an adained rabbi. So James, who'd be nominated by the day rabbi on the other. Excellent. Thank you so much. And you are part of the tribe. And James talks in the book about tribe building. Yossi is a member of the tribe.

And James, talk about tribe building. People are always the most suspicious of those they see as the other. A powerful strategy for gaining rapport and status is to find a common identity with those you're dealing with. We call this tribe building. and in any situation where you know you're coming in at a lower status or having your status framed upon by somebody else, that can be used either to your advantage or to your disadvantage. Can you talk about tribe building?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, I'll give an example. In stand-up comedy, so this is related to micro skills as well. As Brian was saying earlier, there's no such thing as being good in business. there's micro skills that make up the meta skill of businesses sales negotiation execution persuasion and so on uh same thing with stand-up comedy it's not just humor it's likeability it's crowd work it's punchlines it's storytelling it's stage it's stage work as well as it's mic work

there's lots of uh microskills and tribe building is good in public speaking it's good in any kind of event it's good for stand-up comedy so here's how it works in stand-up of comedy. You have to get the crowd to like you. Otherwise, they're not going to laugh. Even if you're funny, they're not going to laugh if they hate you. And if they like you, they might laugh at things that aren't funny. So one way to gain likeability is to try build. So let's say, you know, there's one part of the crowd. You say, where are you from? Oh, they're from Ontario or they're from Paris. Then there's a, then there's a bunch, that was, let's say that's a table of women. and there's a table of men.

Oh, they're also from Paris. They're in the other side of the room. You say, hey, you guys exchange numbers. You just start dating each other. Maybe even tonight you can have sex with each other. You're all from Paris. Or you could say something else that kind of relates them to each other. Like, you know, is it true people in Paris have a lot more sex?

You guys, you know, and you ask each table to answer. And so now you've created a tribe across the room of these Parisians who are laughing, because you're interacting with them, and they're in with you now. They're in the tribe with you. I'm not very good at socializing, you know, and I realized when I started moving down to Florida,

everybody here is friendly and wants to socialize. And they socialize. It doesn't matter what they do for a living. It's supposed to New York City where very much matters when you socialize, and they can socialize for 10 straight hours at a time. This is very difficult for me. So I try to build by finding, And 60% of the people in South Florida are these games, card games, that are played in South America.

And I learned them and studied them and got good at them. And I can suggest now, hey, let's play this Peruvian card game, Barocco, next time we hang out. And oh, great, let's do that. And so now I can socialize for 10 hours because I love playing games. Wow. I tried them. You did, yeah. So, James, I know you got to go on to another international.

interview with the International Space Station. But I do want to take a question from rehab, which is something we've all been noticing. There you are. Rehab. Is that how you pronounce your name, or Hab? Exactly. Thank you so much. Of course.

I used to be a huge fan of you following you and Kura. What happened? I haven't been seeing you answering questions because that's the favorite. I like to read more than listen, to be completely honest. So I haven't been seeing your post lately. Yeah, I love for I think that's one of my favorite Social media sites

I was using it for years And just to be honest I just in the past few months I've gotten them a little burnt out I think I probably over did it this year And then I have never experienced them As I did from this one arm

All social media And you know Quora I've Probably took a little longer time off From that But you're right I should get back To get into that

So I will well james i want to thank you so much not only for uh for your you know time that you've devoted to us today for joining clubhouse and now millions of people can interact with you live as i've had the privilege of doing want to wish you all the best with the best book that you've written in my that could be a backhand that could be it's your best book okay well that's that's okay you know, but it's also one of the best books I've read. Actually, the end, I'm going to,

I'm going to leave the biggest cliffhanger. I needed a box of tissues at the end. I don't cry very easily, James. I'm a manly man, as you know, from having tried to lift me up in person once. But I want to thank you for all the gifts that you've given to the world, and this one especially. I want to wish you,

uh, brahout and hat slacha and all the good stuff in the world for this wonderful book. please not only follow James on Clubhouse, follow Jay, follow Cammy, follow everybody up on stage. I don't run in there. I'm going to follow everybody.

I don't care what people think about that. James, thank you so much. Thank you, Ryan. And I will talk you soon, and I'll be back on Clubhouse soon. I love this. I'm going to think of some ideas for Clubhouse now. Awesome.

All right, everybody. Thank you so much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode into the impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher.

We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Briankeeding.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to Imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human

Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Balco. So,