Modern Wisdom - #138 - James Altucher - Treat Your Life As An Experiment

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

James Altucher is a chess master, writer, entrepreneur, investor, podcaster and comedian. Overcoming our life's natural inertia is hard. We overplan, overthink and hold off starting a plan because we're not ready. Today James takes us through his approach for experimenting with life and jumping into new things feet-first. This is the second in a two-part episode with James, they can be enjoyed separately or together. I figured I'd try experimenting with ideas too! Extra Stuff: Buy Choose Yourself - https://amzn.to/2GlYDYd Check out James' Website - https://jamesaltucher.com/ Follow James on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jaltucher Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

by essentially helping Robert Green to write books. I just love the way that James comes across with such a fearlessness to do things in life. He really overcomes that inertia and that natural laziness that we all have. Loads to take away from today. The first ever two part of For Modern Wisdom, which is my version of a little life experiment this week. James, you're a legend, man. Thanks so much for coming on. Please welcome the Wise and Wonderful James Altature. Right, so, well, we're talking about date night, we were talking about ideas. What did I have in my head?

That was it. That was it, cool. One of the things that I was talking about recently was with an ex-Marines officer from the UK, and he was talking about his time over in Afghanistan, and he was a Somalia pirate hunter. Somali pirate hunter was like his second sort of career after he left, left work in Afghanistan. And he was talking about just how different life is out there. And he said he was talking about singing the praises of travel and new experiences. And what you've suggested to there about the

idea generation and how important it is is you kind of don't really know what you like until you try to do something. Our sample size, the sample size of experiences that we're working with is such a fraction of the total potential number of experiences that you could have as a human. Unless you try something, how do you know whether you do or don't like it? Unless you try something, how do you know whether you do or don't like it? Right, like people often think to themselves that they can think their way to their passion. There's no way to figure out what your passion is with just your brain.

You have to do things that there's no thinking. You have to actually do in order to know. And that's critical. That's why travel is interesting. If you're the sort of person who benefits a lot from travel or if you enjoy traveling, travel to as many places as possible to see where you like, what you like to do, what you like to do in each place. For me, I like to experiment with these different ideas because again, I'm not going to know until I do something.

I'm not going to know what it's like to write. Like, I could think of a great plot in my head for a novel, but I'm not going to know what it's like to write a novel unless I sit down and write it. One of the things this, I'm sorry to interrupt this very important distinction because it's the difference between learning something in school and the real world. Because in school, no matter what you do, the thing you're most learning is the thing you're most learning in a classroom, are classroom skills. You can only learn real world skills in the real world. There's no other way. One of the things I've been thinking about recently, we're at the start of the New Year, New Year, New Year's goals, how do I relate my 25 year vision to my five year epoch to my one year medium

term goals to my daily habits and routines and blah, blah, blah. So I've kind of been swimming in the master betray world of personal development for the last little while just because I do quite like to look at that sort of stuff. And I speak to a lot of the guys on this podcast. And certainly one of the things that it appears to be there is quite a top down approach to how you should experiment with your life, that getting distracted by shiny things and pivoting as it's called, that's like that's the silicon valley term for it, right? It's like you can pivot with your particular brand direction or your particular goals.

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

But now I want to do that. And now I'm like, oh, I can I do three? Shall I start doing YouTube videos? Shall I start doing short form content? Blah, blah, blah. But I don't know until I do that. And I do think a lot of the time we consider, I certainly know that I do,

and the listeners might do as well. I consider the barriers, not necessarily the barriers to entry, but kind of like the skill set that I need or the amount of planning and understanding that I need in order to be able to get an idea moving. It's like, oh well, you know, like you the Trump thing, right? Trump's card thing. Right, well, if I sit down, if I knock the back end of this week off

and I don't go away this weekend, I could maybe sit down and begin to do a plan about what the brand name might be. And then once I've done it, it's so pedestrian and so slow. Whereas it seems like you're just pants off, gear out, jump into the pool, feet first. Here I am. This is what we're doing. Yeah, well, some things though are hard.

Like, let's say, from the podcast, you wanna say, well, I'm gonna also make it big on YouTube. YouTube videos that really work, and the YouTube channels that really work require a lot more production value than a podcast usually to succeed, and let's say succeeding means, you know, getting a million views on a YouTube video. And it also requires some consistency.

You might have high production value for 50 videos in a row without any success. And then the 51st video becomes wildly successful because you've started to find your voice on YouTube. And after that, it's all systems go. And you might say to yourself, this is where you might think, okay, that's not an experiment.

I'm willing to try because I'm not that into it. Or it doesn't excite me that much. Yeah, sure, it'd be great to be, have a 50 million YouTube subscribers, but I just don't wanna put the time in right now because I'm enjoying the time I'm doing on other things. So a lot of the experiments I described, I figure out, just make money, some of those don't.

You kind of experiment on what will make money, what doesn't. And like I always think of myself, man, I wish I had more presence on YouTube. And I try, I experiment a little, but I can see it is going to require more effort than I'm, then my personal compass is telling me to put in. That said, I just started experimenting with TikTok, which is totally different. And I'm kind of enjoying the creativity on TikTok. And so I don't really care how many followers I get or how many views I get. It's just kind of fun.

And so if I have a few free moments, I might try another TikTok video or something, because it doesn't really require as much effort, as much production value to create a decent TikTok video. These low friction, low time and resource investment ideas seem to be the sort of thing that's quite fun to play around with. I have to say, quite embarrassingly, despite being a businessman slash entrepreneur of one kind or another for the last 13 years, I'm certainly in the camp that I described, one that maybe moves quite sort of pedestrianly with things, very considered. It's an attention

to detail, but it's just, it's borderline just like neurotic and very restricting when it comes to things like that. I certainly think if I was able to move a little bit more towards that expedited look, it's an idea. It's an idea just to have a crack at an idea. Maybe I wonder what would we like to do salsa dancing? I wonder what it would be like if I learned to public spit. I wouldn't blah, blah, blah. And I just fucking go to a class.

Like don't think about, don't research which is the best class, Like just go to the class. Yeah, totally. Like a couple of years ago, I was, I took a bunch of ping pong lessons, by the way. And I, and I, and I, so you could get good at spin. Potentially, I was already pretty good, but I wanted to get better. And I, I took classes and other things. And then I wanted to also,

this was gonna be the year. I was gonna sit down and write a novel. I've written a lot of non-fiction books. I hadn't written a novel. And then one day, I went up on stage and did stand-up comedy at a comedy club. And I loved it. And so if I had made myself a goal this year,

I'm doing a novel and nothing's gonna get in the way. And I'm not gonna be distracted by shiny objects. I never would have tried stand-up comedy. And I loved doing it and it was a difficult skill to learn, but I decided, you know what, I love this so much, like my inner compass is telling me, this is a direction to go. So I said, okay, no novel.

And I'm just gonna focus on this. And it's like five years later, I'm still, you no novel and I'm just going to focus on this and it's like five years later. I'm still, you know, actually I'm headlining at a major club in New York City this weekend. So you know what? That's incredible. Yeah, and so your inner compass kind of tells you which directions to go and I gave up the ping-pong classes. I gave up some other things I was trying, gave up writing the novel, and focused on this one thing.

Without it hurting my business, I run an entire business without hurting my business, because you know, Stan have come to me and said, nah, in a business during the day. I think, again, having looked at the productivity world and the listeners will be familiar with this, that they say you're true calling in life, is it the intersection of what you're good at, what you love to do, what you can be paid for and what society needs, and trying to create this Venn diagram and map on this sort of weird polygon with all of the different attributes of whatever it is that you do and blah blah. It does feel like kind of putting the cart before the horse a little bit with this stuff. It's like, look,

like if you just, if you just do the thing, if you just make the experiment, reality will reflect back to you whether or not it's a good idea. Your visit day to day experience of it will tell you whether or not you enjoy it. The success that you have in it will tell you whether or not you're any good at it. Right, because, because think about it, like, let's take that Greenland experiment I did earlier. The world didn't need me to do it and I wasn't necessarily good at it. You don't really know anything until you start doing it and there's result you get some feedback and you're in the feedbacks good enough that you're like, oh, I want to keep doing

it. Look, here I am five years into the comedy thing. The world certainly doesn't need me telling jokes to them. And the world has not decided to pay me for it. So it's a matter of, you don't really know what that bend diagram looks like until you're already there. And then, you just have to kind of like try things and follow your heart. And this doesn't mean quit your job and only do things you love, but it does mean experiment a lot, experiment in some things that make money right away, experiment in some things that might make money 10 years in the future.

By the way, it's the intersection of all of your interests where you'll probably find you make the most amount of money in the end. So you have to have, though, interest that you get good at to have an intersection to those things until you even know what's going to happen at that intersection. It's a unique offering, isn't it? You know, this is one of the things that I think about the totality of our experience. And as you get old and I've just, I'm 31, I'm 32 this year and I'm getting to the stage now where I'm able to actually genuinely say that I have like a curated list of different, different interests. Because like,

at 25, you just get ragged around by life. It's like, oh, I found myself in a ping pong club and then one time I fell into a swimming pool and I swam for a bit like you do the Range the broadness of your perspective of life experiences There's not I don't feel like you have enough time to be able to piece together Well, this is a commonality between this and this and oh shit. I actually know a guy that is a chef in a secret restaurant who actually plays ping pong on a weekend and does it this like, you know, it's now starting to at least piece together where I can see some of the commonalities between these different things. And interestingly, I actually did an exercise today that was working out my core values, which I've never done before. And I found that to be really interesting to try and

look back at what are the different things, all of the different stuff that I enjoy in life was involved with one of these five core values. It was really interesting. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, again, what happens is, is that trying different things, you're going to, if you get good or even mildly good, even mediocre at like a bunch of different things that you've been experimenting with. You never know when the intersection of those things turns into something huge, even if the pieces never made money for you or never got huge. But if everything's aligned with your core values, so that means the intersection should be aligned with your core values,

it's going to, it's going to work out somehow at the intersection. So for instance, 30 years ago, I started writing every day. I didn't make a single dime on writing until 12 years later. And I didn't make significant money on writing until maybe three or four years after that. And but also during the time, you know, about 20 years ago, I started investing professionally. And at first I was very bad at it. And then I learned, I came up with ideas to learn and get better and better and better and more and more knowledgeable, because I had a very untraditional path towards investing. Like, I wasn't an MBA.

I never studied it. I had to really learn everything on my own. And after about 15 years of that, I combined my writing with my investing skill and experience. By that point, I had vast experience investing and knowledge, and I created an investment newsletter, and that made me a significant amount of money. That made me far more money than investing ever made me, and that made me far more money than writing ever made me, and that made me far more money than writing ever made me. Actually, by now, investing has caught up and made me more, but at the time, writing an investment related course made me a significant amount of money.

To unique offering, right? Who else is there that has that particular blend of experiences? There's one of the things that I, the new ones that I struggle with with all of this is the Explorer exploit paradigm again. So it's like, look, I don't follow, I don't, so I, for instance, my favourite podcast is Joe Rogan, one of the reasons I listen to him is because as far as I'm concerned, he's the best on the planet at asking, he's the best man on the planet at asking questions. I don't follow someone who is one tenth as good as Joe Rogan,

but also has nine other things that he is one tenth as good at Joe Rogan as well. So what I'm saying is we follow people who are at the absolute peak within their end, or we tend to follow people who are the very best within each individual section. And I know that there would be some people who would say, well, it's all well and good saying that you're going to experiment and you can play around with shiny things, but you're going to get out competed by the person who has one fewer thing to do than you do and dedicate to the same proportion of their time to it. Wait, but let's say, you know, let's say, you know, you found your Joe Rogan's your favorite

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

No, oh man. No, is it is a good open vanished is my it's it's quite it's like maybe three or four years old. The guy pain Lindsay the guy that created it is just out of this world. This is a real life 10-year-old missing person Inquiry that had gone cold and pain Lindsay this guy is just like, ah, I just fancy starting a podcast about this thing and starts doing it and then is investigating week on week as he's releasing episodes. So he's iterating live, releasing an episode about what happened in the last week, then there's a discussion forum, then he starts doing live Q&As, then he gets like legal experts in to do extra episodes in between these ones where they'll review the evidence, the case

evidence, and then at the end of season one, which remember, this isn't planned, this isn't like some sort of storyline with a fucking arc, at the end of season one, they're going to trial. Wow, man, I'll link you to it once we're finished. It is phenomenal. But yes, so- But this is a great example of what I'm talking about. Like, I'm assuming that guy is a very good interviewer because he's able to interview enough to talk to witnesses and other people possibly involved in the crime and so on. So he's a good interviewer, but he probably said to himself, you know what? I don't want to do an interview podcast.

It's already Joe Rogan. There's already other people out there doing that. Even if I was better than them, nobody really knows if I'm better or not. Nobody could tell the difference between 20% better and 20% worse. So I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do something completely different. You can't succeed by just being better. You have to be different also. So that was the way he thought about doing a podcast and that was the right approach. If he had just done an interview podcast, he'd be like the other 500,000 interview podcasts. I get you. So what we've kind of swam around here is what we done an interview podcast, he'd be like the other 500,000 interview podcasts. I get you.

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

Yeah, because yeah, so we live in like you mentioned before, like we're having because of this world of abundance, possibly there's this opportunity for an existential crisis. Why are we here? What should we do? And I don't think we're having that, just because there's less factory jobs, doesn't mean we're struggling with our purpose in life. Most people didn't really want to work in the factory anyway, but I do think that the life is complex enough that we're switching careers and passions and interests very often in our lives. So I've probably switched careers 12 different times in my life, and I'll probably switch

it 12 different times again. Who knows? And you always have to say, well, but wait, I'm 40 or I'm 45 or I'm 60 or I'm 70. How am I going to possibly get started on playing golf now? I'm never going to be the best golf player in the world. So, so, A, you have to, you have to figure out, well, what's the metrics for success in my new interest? Like, why do I want to do this? And not as a goal, but just like, how do I determine if I'm making progress

or do I want progress? And then if you do want progress, there's always a hierarchy. There are people who are the worst and there are people who are the best and there's a hierarchy from first to last. So if you want to write a book, sure, you could write a book and never publish it, or you could write a book and self publish it and have no sales, or you could write a book, self publish it, have lots of sales, or you could write a book and get huge advances and sell

millions of copies and so on. So you have to kind of decide where in the hierarchy, you know, you kind of want to be. And then no matter what it is, unless it's like, you know, you kind of want to be. And then no matter what it is, unless it's like, you know, you're seven years old and you want to be a professional basketball player, which is, you have to be realistic also. But let's say you have realistic metrics, then you have to decide everyone's going to tell you you're too old or you've got to do this for 20 years at least or the 10,000 hour rule, you got to do it for 10,000 hours before you're in the top 1% of whatever hierarchy you're joining, whether it's professional this or professional ping-pong

or whatever. Comedy. Comedy. And my theory is that the 10,000 hour rule only works for very repetitive tasks, like memorizing strings of numbers, for instance, or playing the piano, which as, of course, there's artistic component of playing the piano, but a lot of it is repetitive, just playing over and over again, the same pieces, and that's how you learn, and you get feedback, you do, you get feedback from an instructor,

and then you play it again, you get feedback, you play it again. But my theory is you could skip the line with what I call the 10,000 experiment role, which is, and there's various types of experiments you could do that are better than others. But essentially, every time you do an experiment in the area that you're interested in, you'll learn something, you'll get better, and you'll also start differentiating yourself and finding your own unique way of doing something that's different from everyone else. So for instance, you know with with with comedy, there's a British comedian who I admire a lot. His name is Chris Turner

and he as what I call he has skipped the line. So what he did was he's been doing stand-up comedy. He's 27 years old So nobody would say nobody in the comedy world would traditionally say, oh, he's 27 years old doing comedy, he should be that is, you know, starring in every comedy club in the world. No, he's, they would say no, he's got to do it a few more years. But he also, if you give him five completely random words, he will do the most within seconds of thinking about it, he will do the most within seconds of thinking about it. He will do the most amazing freestyle rap on the fly. It'll be and rap won't just be like rhyming the words.

He'll it'll be so intelligent and so funny and he just made it up and and I've seen him do it with five random words like I came up with the random words and he just did it right there. And now he's performs in any comedy club in the world that he wants to because he's not just a standout comedian. He also has this other skill. He differentiated himself. He skipped the line because he experimented with combining his interest in rapping with standout comedy. And that's given him this unique voice in the standout comedy world. Nobody else on the planet does that like he does. And particularly

as intelligently as he does, even if someone else wrapped, they can't do it as intelligently as he does. He's super smart. And so, you know, that's an example. And so for me, I've been able to skip the lines somewhat, like I said, I'm headlining at a Caroline's on Broadway on Saturday. I've been able to skip the line because, in part, I've made it a lifelong effort to learn how to learn. So I could pick up lots of different interests and learn very quickly. So I would start to use that technique on comedy

and then I combine my podcast with that where I had some of the best comedians in the world on my podcast and so I'm able to ask them any question I want. Like, I'll think about the difficulties I've been having the past week in comedy. And let's say I have this world famous comedian on. I'll say, well, what if this, this, this, and this happens to you? What would you do? Now, nobody else gets that opportunity to ask the top comedians, very specific situations about how they would respond. I've gotten, every time they answer a question like that, it's like I skip months and months or years of learning and whatever it is I'm asking.

And, you know, and then I've had other opportunities like that to, you know, as helped me skip the line quite a bit. Are there some principles or some foundations to skipping the line that are universal or be universally helpful, so I can think of some. One of them would probably be having some form of a platform online or some kind of notoriety that allows you to reach people. That's enabled you to do certain things, get better podcast guests, get when you release a GoFundMe to try and buy green run to garner a little bit of media retention, which then becomes self-propeptually in and blah, blah. You mentioned about your ability to learn and stuff like that.

Are there any other foundational elements to this? Well, I think foundational is exercising that creativity muscle and keeping the rest of your lives healthy emotional physical and so on, but when you exercise that creativity muscle, you're able to come up with Experiments. What can I how can I experiment to improve this aspect of my knowledge or life or whatever? So for instance with comedy again, I was having a hard time Coming up with one miners like I'm a public speaker for a long time. So that instance, with comedy again, I was having a hard time coming up with one minors. Like I'm a public speaker for a long time. So that means I'm good at storytelling and humorous storytelling. But coming up with one line is it's one sentence that gets

people to laugh. That wasn't an expertise of mine. So what I did was, here's an experiment I did, took a half hour. I went on onto a subway, you know, an underground train, you know, subway, and every stop I moved from car to car in the subway, and I would do stand-up comedy in the subway. And now, no other person sitting in the subway wanted to hear me do it. So it was really difficult. It was really out of my comfort zone. You have to be a little out of your comfort zone. It have to be a little out of your comfort zone. It's gotta be a little uncomfortable because no one's ever done it before.

So it's gotta be uncomfortable. And I had to really tighten up my jokes super hard to get anybody to laugh. And that was an experiment that helped me improve my one-liners. And by the way, it also became a story, I could tell, or a story I could write about. And in fact, I expanded it even further. I created the entire format of a late-night TV show,

and I had on a guest, I had on a musical guest, all in the subway, audience participation, where I'd interview people sitting in the subway, because I was starting to get really comfortable with talking with people on the subway. And so, and that experiment didn't really work in the sense that I, you know, I put up a video of my, my late night talk show in the subway format. And, you know, I could have kept doing that and made it like a real show, but I didn't

really want to, but at least it was an experiment. I had to study the late night format. I had to get better at one-liners. Again, not great because you'll never be great down there. And it was fun. And then I have a story to tell from it. And look, if that first one was huge, that would have been a different story. It's the main thing that I've got in my mind is for the listeners, I'm going to record the fourth wall for a second. James is a sound guy, the guy that sets up his sound is called J.

And all I've got in the back of my mind when you're talking about this subway thing is the nightmare that sound guy J would have with capturing clean audio. I'm just thinking like J's gonna have to, like James has decided to have this idea. And poor J's there, looking along an entire sound desk

in a desperate attempt to try and drown out the sound of the subways wheels on metal. I mean, the good thing is though you get captioned, so we captioned things and had Mike's on and so on. But it was again, it was a fun because I did videotaping because that's the other thing too is you want to be able to have some way of measuring your experiment. So I, so for instance, when I do comedy, I videotaped so I could watch it later. I try to do that every time. I don't always do it, but I try to do it because you have to be able to measure your progress. But again, like with anything, like even with a podcast, so I do two interview podcasts a week with with guests, usually guests who

are somewhat celebrities, famous, whatever, but I'm experimenting with format too. So I'm trying, I'm about to start trying a format that instead of it being an hour or two hours, it's 15 minutes where I just tell a little story and maybe there's a co-host who just asks basic questions. And then in 15, 20 minutes, it's done. So actually, we just did one, it was a little more than 15 minutes, but I it's done. So actually, we just did one, it was a little more than 15 minutes, but I had never done this before. I ran, the whole, I ran situation, happened over the weekend. So Sunday, I called, I wanted to know more and I assumed my audience wanted to know more. So I called up a top military intelligence official.

I got the complete breakdown about what was happening. and I ran that the very next day on Monday And I had never done anything like that was an experiment I never done that before and that will be my most downloaded episode in the past two months Wow, how cool is that? Yeah, that's awesome Yeah, the the short form thing on audio is really interesting I was having a discussion with Matt from podcast notes who I know will be listening and I Couldn't work at, it's such a wild west at the moment with this, but I can totally see a place for it.

You know, like Navarre was doing those three minute long podcasts that was a part of his, how we get rich without getting lucky series. And you know, who listens to these three minute podcasts, but then at the end of it, when he creates a three and a half hour omnibus collage thing of them all, you're actually like, kind of makes a bit of sense. So we talked about skipping the line. We've talked about the fact that experimenting is an important part of that. What else have you been thinking about to do with skipping the line recently? Well, another thing that's important is to

You know whenever you're in a line Or whenever you're trying to succeed at something as I mentioned earlier, there's a hierarchy There's there's the worst going all the way up to the best the best all the going all the way down the worst and the best Tends to look down at the worst and whatever you know where you are in the hierarchy We're primates primates tend to know where they where they are in the hierarchy. The benefit of being human is we could diversify our hierarchies as opposed to being stuck in one tribe. But you know, there's all sorts of interesting techniques. So for instance, what if you're trying to succeed at something, but you take a step back and take a lower job, become the big fish in a smaller

pond, but that allows you to then skip four steps forward when, because you become known as the best in this smaller pond. What's an example of that? So a friend of mine was a lawyer and he finished his law degree and he wanted to be in the CIA and the Central Intelligence Agency. And he he he's couldn't for whatever reason. So he took an internship, usually set aside for people still in their undergrad years, like the first or second year undergrad.

Here he was the lawyer or he went to grad school, got a law degree, whatever. He took an internship with the Secret Service, and they were like, what do you, the Secret Service, the Secret Service is the, part of the White House that protects the president. It's like the guard. And they were like, why do you want to be in the internship program?

That's only for teenagers, you're already a lawyer. And he's like, don't worry about it. I'm really interested. So they let him in. And because he was a lawyer, he was able to deliver legal documents to the president occasionally. And in order to do that, he had to get top secret clearance. So now he's the only intern ever who has top secret clearance. So he uses that to suddenly get a job at, I think it was actually, I think it was maybe

the FBI or the CIA, I forget the exact details, but he got a job at the internship program for the CIA because nobody in the internship program there had top secret clearance and was a lawyer. And then using that in his spare time, he would listen around, he would look for what are opportunities. Oh, his bosses bosses boss was looking for some potential terrorist. He had time he tracked the person down. So now he pleased as bosses bosses boss. This guy said, who are you? I'm an intern. I'm an intern, but I happen to be the only intern with top secret clearance animal lawyer. So he got quickly promoted up to the CIA. So he moved much faster. He skipped a line right where he wanted to be at the CIA by taking two steps

backward each time. And that's another interesting technique is to keep your ego out of it. Sometimes you got to take two steps backward to succeed four steps forward. So you're good story. I wonder how much do you think that he had that perfect plan at the time? Because, you know, with hindsight, with the benefit of hindsight, it sounds like the most masterful idea in history. I don't know if he had that plan in time, although I will ask him, and but I've known other people have done similar things. It always seems to be a pretty good technique that works. Like, you know, Ryan Halliday and Ryan Halliday's books. So Ryan Halliday is a great writer. He's written several New York Times bestsellers. His last book, Stillness is the key, was number

one on the New York Times bestseller. Let's just came out a few months ago. But he started off. He quit college and he started off. He just wanted to be an apprentice. He helped the author, Robert Green, do helped the author Robert Green do research So Robert Green wrote 48 laws of power and some other great books He simply did was like a research assistant for Robert Green But he did really well at that and then Robert Green recommended to another company that Ryan should be there Head of you know, you know help run marketing He ended up being so good at that. He became the head of, you know, help run marketing. He ended up being so good at that. He became the head

of marketing. But then he took another step back. He became intern for another writer. He learned a lot. He became, he started helping Tim Ferris with his marketing because his combination of writing internships with, you know, marketing experience. He helped Tim Ferris. And then suddenly, he wrote a book. He knew all the right agents. He knew how to market it. He knew how to market it, he knew how to distribute it and his books became best sellers. So, you know, that was a great case of moving a couple of steps backward to achieve his goal. He's a jetman. Robert is a past, past modern wisdom guest and he's a fantastic guy as well. I mean, that is one baptism of fire,

I can imagine, especially seeing the size of Robert Green's books, like 48 laws of powers. And the 30 hours long, I think it's unordable, something like that. Absolutely. Yeah. And a half. So there's, I can just imagine like a poor young, slightly spotty Ryan holiday, like running around, going and getting, like going into dusty shelves, getting stuff down off the library.

Yeah. And he learned a lot like you could see the results of Robert Green's teaching and the way Ryan puts together blocks. So it's a great technique. I mean, for me, I worked at a television company HBO and I might go I wanted to make TV shows, but I couldn't get a job making TV shows for HBO. I had no experience. So I took a job as a junior software programmer for HBO.

I was just in the in the IT department, the software department. And but my foot was in the door. So I pitched to them, hey, why don't we make an original web show for the internet? And they said, of course, that's a great idea. And so then I took that original web show, I showed how much traffic it was getting, and I used it to pitch an actual TV show, and they gave me money to shoot it as a pilot.

So again, that was my way of skipping the line. Like I was the only programmer ever in the IT department to be shooting a pilot for HBO. Here's an idea that I've had recently. So I'm starting to do some productivity and leadership coaching within some companies, ones in Germany, ones in actually in New York. So hopefully I'll be over later this year. And one of the ideas I've been thinking about to just speak to new clients and to kind

of just learn what it's like to give a speech to a room, I haven't done a massive amount of public speaking, was I was thinking of just cold emailing a bunch of big businesses who have high powered sales floors, execs, you know, like real, real sort of go get their companies and just saying, look, do you want me to come in and just give a one hour presentation on how everybody in this office can be more productive if they use a few tools and go about it with a couple of different approaches to the way that they view their productivity. And I was thinking about that, and I was like, well, that's...

That kind of sucks. Like, I value my time at more than zero pounds per hour. But on the flip side of that, after doing a few of those, even if no one books me, even if no one decides to get coaching off me, I've got a shitload of experience, and I've got some cool stories, and maybe the bossal need a guy that does a podcast in a couple of months' time and whatever, whatever. Yeah, I don't think that's a bad idea. I think one step easier and maybe better, we'll see, is study the company, study what they might be, well, maybe they could do better. Do your 10 ideas thing and say,

oh, here's 10 ideas to improve your sales at this company. I'm not charging anything. I'm happy to come in and talk to you guys or not. But here's 10 ideas. I'm a customer of your company and I really love your product. But I see where things could be a little better. Here's 10 ideas you could just have for free and they're uniquely catered to you. Knock yourselves out.

See you later and just give for free. And you know what will happen is some of them are going to respond to you and say, hey, we'd love for you to come in and see what we're up to and maybe talk to us more about this. You know, if you write, if you write 20 emails like that, three or four will certainly respond and say, hey, why don't you come in and hang out a little and we'll just talk about this. You had a really interesting example on impact theory

where you were talking about how there's quite a lot of friction even when someone thinks that they're doing something nice. And they say to you, like, I think your example was, hey, James, I'd love to come and be your intern. But then there's actually a whole load of work attached to you. Like, you got to find this, this intern, what do you, what are you good at? What do you want me to, what do you are going to do? Do you clean the floor? Do you check their emails? Do you respond to the Facebook or whatever? Whereas you were like, look, if you go to someone and you're

like, look, ready made. Here's 10 ideas of how I can help you. Do you want me to help you? Yeah, or yeah, exactly. Like if you don't give them homework, like if they, if you say I could come in and speak to you, they got to arrange that now. And instead, I wouldn't even say here's 10 ideas I could do for you.

I would say here's just 10 ideas to make your life better, or make your job better, or make your sales better, whatever, see you later, nice knowing you. And some people will respond, like occasionally I get that, occasionally somebody will send me, hey, I think here's 10 ways your website could be better, or here's 10 ways, here's 10 ideas for your podcast, and not just

people all the time, though, 10 guests at me, but that doesn't help me. But here's 10 ways to get, here's 10 ways to get in touch with them. And that helps me a lot. That's, I've met, I've had a lot of meetings where people have definitely offered value in their emails and I said, okay, let's talk more about this. I love that concept. I think certainly to differentiate yourself. We've been talking a lot about differentiating

yourself. How can you use the uniqueness that you have as a person? And one of the most unique things that we have as people is our networks, right? Like there's only you. There is precisely only you that knows all of the people on the planet that you know. And now you know one more because you know me. Like there's precisely you. And that is it.

So the power of networking when you look at that is, it is one way to out compete every single other person is to utilize your networking correctly. And here's the thing, what people don't realize. This is the difference between linear power from your network and exponential power from your network. So I can view my network as let's say I know a hundred people. There's like draw a line between me and all those hundred people.

That's a hundred lines. But now what if you draw lines between all of them, not even including you. So let's say you give your connections to your entire network. So now, instead of 100 lines, there's 10,000 lines because all 100 are connected to all other 100. And that's when you introduce two people that you think could help each other, they're not gonna forget who introduced them. You're still there, even though it's a little more vague. You're still in that connection there.

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

And I described the articles completely. So it would be almost trivial for him to write the articles. And he wrote back and he said, these are great. Why for him to write the articles and and and he wrote back and he said these are great Why don't you write the articles and that was the very first professional writing gig I ever had That's awesome. That's such a good example Yeah, as you were talking about how you linking people in together I was thinking about Kamal mutual friend of mine in yours and Michael Kaju who all of the the listeners will know CEO of Bruce strength And I link both of those in yesterday. I was like, just chatting to Michael about something and it just came into my head.

I was like, fuck, you need to get Kamala on the Brute Strength podcast. Link them in. And now, now they're away. Michael, I sent, this is a cool one. So I had Aubrey on the show. Aubrey Marcus is the most difficult man on the planet to get hold of, by the way. But his assistant managed to get in with him. And he's in Austin and Michael, my buddy, CEO of Bruce Strength in Austin

and Michael's like kind of into this self-development space as well. And him and his misses a D, they do a lot of stuff. And I was like, it would be awesome. You should totally link up on it. Then they, he went, Michael went and I think Michael's wife went and did a podcast with I think Michael's wife went and did a podcast with Orbarez X-Misses Whitney. And now, and I was like, the exponential thing. I didn't even link those two people in, but because of the first iteration of that, and then, you know, it's, it is a, and it's a good feeling as well. It's, it's, it's, it's valuable because it makes you part of the club. It makes you part of the scene that everyone else is trying to build.

And it's really important. It's an important skill in today's society to kind of not feel scarce about your network. Like, well, I don't want him knowing him. I only want to know each of them. Like even the first time you and I spoke, I didn't know you were going to have, I didn't know you knew Kamal. And I said, Oh, you should have come on your podcast. Like just having a reflex of just anybody who can help anybody else, just don't hold back. Like it's a world of abundance and and don't be afraid of of losing connections by giving them to someone else.

That's not how it works. You don't really give a connection to someone else. You copy the connection and give the copy to someone. That's a beautiful way to put it. Look, James, man, we've been going for forever. I've taken up so much of your day, but it's been great. Thank you so much. This is a great podcast. You're a great interviewer. And I was really happy to come on. It's been an absolute pleasure. If the listeners want to find out more, where should they go to hassle you online or find out your stuff? Check out my podcast, the James Altershow show.

We'll be linked in the show notes below as well, choose yourself on Amazon. You know what to do if you've enjoyed the episode, like, share and subscribe. Definitely go and check out James' podcast. Man, it's been awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Chris. I will talk to you soon. Bye.