The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Skip the Line: The 10,000 Experiments Rule and Other Surprising Advice for Reaching Your Goals by James Altucher

Episode Date: April 4, 2021

Skip the Line: The 10,000 Experiments Rule and Other Surprising Advice for Reaching Your Goals by James Altucher The entrepreneur, angel investor, and bestselling author of Choose Yourself 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. We live in a hierarchical world where experience has traditionally been the key to promotion. But that period is over! Straight, clear-cut career trajectories no longer exist. Industries disappear, job descriptions change, and people’s interests and passions evolve. The key to riding this wave, entrepreneur James Altucher advises, is to constantly be curious about what’s next, to be comfortable with uncertainty so you can keep navigating the rough waters ahead, and most important, to pursue the things that interest you. In Skip the Line, he reveals how he went from struggling and depressed to making his personal, financial, and creative dreams come true, despite—and perhaps due to—his many failures along the way. Altucher combines his personal story with concrete—and unorthodox—insights that work. But Skip the Line isn’t about hacks and shortcuts—it’s about transforming the way you think, work, and live, letting your interests guide your learning, time, and resources. It’s about allowing yourself to do what comes naturally; the more you do what you love, the better you do it. While showing you how to approach change and crisis, Altucher gives you tools to help easily execute ideas, become an expert negotiator, attract the attention of those around you, scale promising ideas, and improve leadership—all of which will catapult you higher than you ever thought possible and at a speed that everyone will tell you is impossible. About James Altucher James Altucher 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].

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here in our great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in today we have a most amazing author for the new book, Skip the Line, The 10,000 Experiments Rule, and other surprising advice for reaching your goals by James Altucher.

And he's an author of a ton of books. We'll be talking every day. To see the video version of this, go to youtube.com. For us, that's Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to all the different groups we have on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, all that sort of good stuff. You can subscribe to it as well. Go to goodreads.com, 4shatschrisvoss, and see what we're up to over there. So today we're going to be talking with James. He's got a ton of books he's written. I'll ask him once he gets here on the show,

but he's actually here to the side of me, but that's weird I'm saying that. But you don't know that because you're probably listening in audio only on the podcast. Just on YouTube, you would. That's a whole other reason to go there and subscribe. I don't know why I'm doing this segue, but it sounded fun when I started it, but I'm not too sure about it now. Anyway, James is a successful entrepreneur, angel investor, chess master, and prolific writer. He has started to run more than 20 companies and currently invested in over 30. He's the author of 18 books, whoa, including the Wall Street Journal's bestsellers,

The Power of No, Choose Yourself, the latest book, Reinvent Yourself, and it was number one on the Amazon store shortly after his release, The Power of No. I think all my girlfriends read that book. Anyway, thank you, James, for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. Welcome. Chris, thank you. And I must say, what a great radio voice you have. Have you ever done radio? This is the closest they'll let me to radio. Unfortunately, with the language I have of tendency to use, like whenever I go on radio, I have to put like a big sign that says,

do not swear. It's a good radio voice. And have you had voice training? Because you know, like a good natural voice. No, had voice training because you know like a good natural voice no i study i study carson a few other people a lot and i don't know i just try hard i don't know excellent i don't know it's uh when you have a face like this it's radio face tell me about i have podcast space face audio only thank you so much chris for having me on the show i really appreciate it thank you for coming thank you for coming so you have launched this new book oh and let's get your plugs so people can find you on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. So you have launched this new book. Oh, and let's get your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs

and know what order of your new book. Yeah, you could. So Skip the Line is my new book. You can find it on Amazon. And I have a podcast also, The James Altucher Show. And I guess on Twitter, I'm at Jay Altucher.

Lately, I honestly, I have not been using social media that much. So it's hard to find me, actually. The James Altucher Show is my favorite. And lately, I've been streaming on Twitch and having fun doing that. I always like to do what's fun. And for a while, Twitter or Facebook was not fun because everyone was arguing on it. In fact, somebody had written in to me and said they were really loving your daily Instagram lives when you were doing them.

Are you still doing those? I just started again because what was happening was at the beginning, I always do a podcast like you. I have like on authors and what's who's the latest shows or whatever. But at the beginning of the podcast, at the beginning of the pandemic, there was so much misinformation being published in the news and there was so much kind of fear and pessimism being published as well. And nobody really understood what was going on. And I started a daily podcast, not because I'm an expert on pandemics or epidemiology, but because I do understand misinformation and news. And I've worked for a lot of the media companies at different points in my career. And i just wanted to set the record

straight and explain why to people whether it was the economy or the pandemic or other issues what was misinformation what wasn't how do you figure these things out for yourself and then also what opportunities existed during the pandemic and i just wanted to cheer people up who were sitting at home during the day and talk about the topics that were on everybody's mind and everybody was afraid about and so it was like a new it was like an experiment for my podcast and the experiment worked because i did them as instagram lives but then i released it on the podcast got more views than my regular podcast i know isn't it funny how that works we take all these and we put them on instagram live feed them through we feed them through restream and uh yellow duck and so it feeds them it doesn't

save them sadly but at least gives them the feed and then we put up a hard copy of a 10 minute thing so it works it works pretty good but we we used our podcast to try and lift people up and stuff but it was good that you did that because people they need to know where the pandemic come from comes from and everyone knows it comes from aliens and the flat earth that we have that's what caused it that's i think so the aliens clearly do you realize like during the pandemic there was news about aliens and it barely reached the newspaper that's how much people were so obsessed with the election and the pandemic that there was at least three different times that there were there was news about potentially

actual aliens like the pentagon had a press conference and admitted for the first time they saw a ufo meaning an object that was flying that they could not identify. And that like barely hit the news. Yeah. Well, the problem was they showed up and they were going to meet with us like close encounters of the third kind, but they didn't bring masks. And we had up the sign. Yeah. It was mandated social distancing.

You need to prove you've either been vaccinated or wear a mask or have a chip in you evidently one of the problems with aliens is they don't usually ship around the universe with n95 masks so they've got to work on that i mean yeah because they get vaccinated on their home planet and they figure what's the chances that covid would be on earth yeah so they have technology where they can speed across the universe at the speed of light but no mess yeah it's kind of weird so let's get talking about your book, Skip the Line, The 10,000 Experiments Rule, and other surprising advice for reaching your goals. Let's start with the title. What is The 10,000 Experiments Rule, and why did you choose that title for this book? Yeah, so I've had a lot of different careers. Sometimes it's because

I do well in a career, and then I go totally broke, and I have been, had a lot of different careers. Sometimes it's because I do well in a career and then I go totally broke and I have to find something else to do. And sometimes because I just simply switch interests. As you get older, you don't want to do the same thing all the time. You want to do the things, there's only one life to live

and you want to do the things that you're passionate about. And also just to like, why should you do the things you're passionate about? And this is always a discussion, should you? And the reason, this is just a side thing, but the reason do the things you're passionate about and this is always a discussion should you and the reason this is just a side thing but the reason you do something you're passionate about is because everything that's that's worth doing is hard to do and you need all the energy you have to do it and our energy is limited each day that's why we sleep to rejuvenate and in order part of the energy required to do something that's hard is, oh my gosh, do I have to sit down and do this difficult thing? And if you love what you're doing, you

don't need that extra energy. You can use that extra energy to get better at what you love. So I just want to set that straight. But every time I switched passions and started doing something that I loved, again, if something's worth doing, it's hard and it's going to suck for a while. It doesn't necessarily make you happy. It makes you feel good about mastery and getting better, but it's not necessarily, oh, I'm ecstatic doing this. So two things. One is it's really hard to get in the top 1% of the world of whatever skill you love doing, whether it's playing golf or being a chef or being an entrepreneur or whatever it is. And number two,

then you have to make money doing it or else you have to stop doing it. It's just a hobby. You can't do it. You have to raise your family. You have to do things. And every time I've switched interests and wanted to do something else for my career, somebody or many people have always said to me, man, you can't do that you can't skip the line people get an mba doing this or people go to acting school or people have been a writer since they were 18 and they studied english in school and you can't skip the line like we've all paid our dues you've got to pay your dues too or talk about the 10 000 hour rule where malcolm gladwell says it takes 10 000 hours to get good at something.

You can't expect to make money before you put in 10,000 hours like the Beatles did. And all this stuff I realized was BS. But it would get me frustrated. What's up with this 10,000 hour rule? Maybe it does take 10,000 hours to get good at something. And I realized I've switched interests so many times and I've made a lot of money at different careers and I've also gotten broke at different careers. But I realized the key is not 10,000 hours,

but doing experiments. So if you get the basic skills, but then if you have a theory about something you're interested in, let's say you want to be a standup comedian, do an experiment that will teach you something. I have, let's say you have a theory. I have a theory that if i go and practice

comedy in a subway car then i will get better at dealing with a hostile audience and i'll get back i'll get better at doing one-liner jokes because you only have it's very fast before they go on to the next before they exit the subway and so that's they throw you off maybe but i did it myself when i i for for six seven years i've been doing stand-up comedy. And when I started, I was so nervous and scared about getting heckled, which I was getting sometimes. When I first started doing it, I went on a subway car with the theory that this will make me a better comedian. And the theory was correct. But even if it wasn't correct, I still would have learned something.

I would have overcome a fear because I was scared to death of doing stand-up on a subway. And I would have a story to tell, which I do. So experiments have very little downside, have huge upside, are cheap to do because Thomas Edison needed to experiment 10,000 times before he found the right filament for a light bulb. So it's got to be cheap. It's got to be easy. It's got to be quick. And there's got to be very little downside and enormous upside. So that's an experiment. cheap. It's got to be easy. It's got to be quick. And there's got to be very little downside and enormous upside. So that's an experiment. And it turns out with whatever you are interested in, you can learn a huge amount and you can skip the line on learning.

So you can quickly be in the top 1% of a category or anything by focusing on this 10,000 experiment idea. And then I have other techniques in the book, but like the 10,000 experiment rule was the one i was grappling with the most because i was terrified i would need 10 000 hours to get good at something i need a faster way i'm at 10 000 hours and my sixth wife is trying to still wait for me to get good at something you know what i mean anyway i'm just kidding no i just that's a bit i do i'll do throughout the show i'll change the number too as we go. All right, good. Yeah, I never got married. I never got tired of being happy.

This is interesting because that's been a big deal that everyone talks about, the 10,000-hour things. If you really want to master something, do it 10,000 hours. And like you're saying, like my wife says, I haven't been able to get that mastered. I'm still looking for that G thing. So you get into it. You show how experimenting is the experiment you're doing. Is that like extreme experimenting?

Like, for example, that you gave with the car in the subway? Because I'll do stand-up on a stage before I'll do it in a subway, especially a New York subway. The problem is, in a weird way, the stage for a comedian is higher stakes than a subway. A subway, there's no stakes, really. Even though it's scary, there's no stakes because you're telling jokes to a bunch of comedians who hate you to a bunch of passengers who hate you who cares if they laugh or not like but they do have groceries with them so that means they have tomatoes and eggs right they get those tomatoes but if you bomb on stage and you love going on stage and the booker is looking at you should i book this guy again that's a little bit

more stakes and also you don't get on stage that frequently like even a great comedian okay forget the grace but when you're starting out it takes you a long time before you're on stage even more than once or twice a week and i got a chance to go in for two hours i went in like 30 different subway cars and did uh comedy in each subway car so i got a lot of experience quickly and by the idea was doing the taking an experimental approach i got quick experience i learned something and i had a theory i tested it out and i even then gave me ideas like i pitched it as a late night tv show doing a late night show on a subway and you never know what ideas that's a good idea yeah does that but like with everything i've ever been interested in and by the way this is true for everyone the in the olympics there's a i don't i forget what's called the high jump you

jump over this bar this guy in the 60s wanted to jump backwards and his coach was like are you crazy and the guy was like coach i i have long legs so when i'm doing this running jump my legs and then you pick up your legs and jump forward. My legs always hit the bar. And so he jumped backwards. It seemed like it was pretty good. Two years later, he won the gold medal. And he was barely a second stringer in his high school team. And two years later, he won the gold medal in the Olympics. And now his move, the Fosbury flop.

His name was Dick Fosbury. Fosbury flop. That's the main move. That's all the high jumpers only do that move. So that was an experiment. And he skipped a line, literally. He went from being the weakest player on his high school team to being the best in the world and winning the gold medal in the Olympics. So that's almost like a classic story. But every industry I've ever switched, whether it's I've run a hedge fund, I was a computer programmer, I've worked in the entertainment industry.

It was always a matter of how do I can't be the top 10 in the world at a scale because who knows what that takes that maybe that does take 10,000 hours, but to be in the top 1% and then separately to learn to monetize the skill, you only need to be in the top one or 2% or even top 5% of an industry to be good enough to monetize it. And that's possible, particularly I talk about many techniques in my book, Skip the Line. One of them is this 10,000 experiment rule. But then to monetize it, people underestimate you also have to learn the field. Let's say you want to be a number one podcaster. Both you and I have top podcasts. And it's good if you're in the top 1% of the world of interviewing, that's great. You'll you're a good interviewer, and you'll probably do a good podcast. But then to monetize it, you have to know how podcasts

are distributed, how to get good guests, how to what how does the iTunes algorithm work? Who should I sign up with to get good ads on my podcast? You have to know the field too. So my book's really about how do you get to be the top 1% in skills, but also how do you get to be the top 1% in your field so you can monetize your passions? There you go. So there you go. So it says here, dozens of techniques and new mindset that's in the book that will inspire any professional, no matter their age or managerial level,

to pursue their passions and quickly acquire the skills to succeed. Do you want to share with us some of the other techniques that you recommend? Yeah. One thing I do, which is really useful, I'll give you a very specific example. So a few months ago, this is like December, I decided, you know what, I'm going to, even though all these techniques have worked for me, I only write about things that have specifically worked for me. I don't care if they've I'm going to, even though all these techniques have worked for me, I only write about things that have specifically worked for me. I don't care if they've worked for other people, they've specifically worked for me. Now, it turns out, I know through my podcast and many interviews that it's worked for a ton of people, these ideas. But I wanted to specifically be very disciplined about using these techniques that I had just written about.

And the book was coming out in a few months from then. It came out a few weeks ago, but this was in December. I was going to get to be stronger than I ever was at chess. So when I was a kid, I was a strong player. I won my state's high school championship, the whole thing. And I was a ranked chess master. But if you haven't studied something in 30 or 40 years, you lose all of your abilities, not just some of your abilities, but all of them. It's not like riding a bike. And so I figured I'm going to, I want to get just as good as I had been 30 years ago when I last studied the game. And not only that, I even want to be better than I ever was. And so specifically only using the techniques in the book in the past three months, I probably achieved both of those goals in chess um and one of the one of

the techniques is it's called plus minus equal and the plus is find yourself a coach get feedback study a lot and so on so that's the the coach could be virtual or real if you want to be a great writer study great writers of the past like earnest hemingway could be your virtual mentor but i i got myself a chess instructor. And then equals are people your level who are rising up also. And you can exchange notes and you can play against them and compete against them. So in business, if you're starting in business, there's other people starting in the same industry. It's good not to think of them as just enemies and competition. You can learn from your frenemies your competition as

well so those are your equals and in chess you could play people who are your ranking and you learn from them and if you talk to them and exchange ideas and so on and then the minus is very important it's even more important than the plus it's giving lessons and if you because if you can't explain something easily then you don't truly understand it and when you teach the basics of something you really learn at a fundamental level in a way that you wouldn't if you just read it in a book or if a teacher told you. So teaching the basics is very important. That's one technique. That's plus minus equal.

And that was told to me by Frank Shamrock. I was about to say I thought of this, but I decided when you hear who Frank Shamrock is, you realize there's a reason why I said this idea was told to me by Frank Shyamrock. So he was 10-time world champion for mixed martial arts. So you definitely do not want to get this guy angry. But he had to learn mixed martial arts for a reason. He had to learn many martial arts at the black belt level in order to be good at mixed martial arts. So he had to learn very quickly many complicated things. And just because you've won martial art doesn't mean you know anything about another martial art.

So they're very different. And another technique is something I call conspiracy numbers. So let's say, and this is more about monetizing an idea. Let's say you're great at some skill and you want to figure out how to make money at it. First, I have what's called the spoke and wheel approach. So let's say I have a friend who's interested in restaurants and he told me all these great ideas about how he would run a restaurant. And I'm like, that's great. It all sounds really creative and original. And he has a bunch of experience. I'm like, well, what do you want to do? And he says, of course, I want to run a restaurant and maybe own a restaurant. And I said, well, I described to him this spoke and wheel approach. I said,

let's put restaurants as the wheel. Owning a restaurant is one spoke, but let's see if we can come up with other spokes that you would be interested in. And so ultimately he came up with consulting for restaurants, consulting for restaurant chains, writing a high-end newsletter to restaurant owners that contains the latest tips and technologies about the restaurant business, doing a podcast, re-interview restaurant owners, writing a book with all his ideas about the 21st century restaurant. And by the end, and he was coming up with all the ideas. These were all things he was interested in. But by the end, he's like, boy, I never went through this exercise. I never thought any of these things. I can work on five of them. And that's the whole idea is that

to monetize, you can't just work on one idea. You have to work on many simultaneously. But as long as you're interested in what's at the wheel, you're going to be interested in most of the spokes as well. If you're interested in sports, you and I are not going to be professional athletes or too old for one thing. I'm too old. I don't know about you. Maybe you're a professional basketball player. But there's lots of things you could do in sports other than being an athlete.

Like a friend of mine was a Hollywood screenwriter. It seemed to me he had the ideal job, but he quit where he was making a ton of money. And he started writing blog posts for $100 a post. He went from making hundreds of thousands of dollars per screenplay to $100 a post. And he would always write about fantasy sports because, again, he wasn't going to be an athlete, but he loved fantasy sports. And then he built up, he got an audience because he was already a good writer.

He had what I called idea sex or job sex where he took his skills from writing, combined it with his interest in sports. And the baby that came out, what were these blog posts on fantasy sports? He was the best. Instead of being writing these dry articles about sports he was writing these really creative story-driven posts about fantasy sports and he got noticed long story short he's now the first anchor at espn who focuses on just

fantasy sports he's their fantasy sports anchor matt berry and he's like a huge personality now and all because he he focused on doing what he loves and he used these techniques and idea sex as mentioned in the book and he's a great anchor now on on fantasy sports he's doing what he loves for the rest of his life so can you define idea sex to me it was interesting you followed that with having a baby on this idea think about this this really works well in music instance, as a way to explain it. But essentially, it's taking – let me take one step back. So one time, I was super, super depressed. I had gotten broke.

I had made some money, and then I had just gotten totally broke, and I was so – I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I couldn't figure out the mechanics of how to make my mouth smile. Like I was so just distraught. And I started, I got a waiter's pad for some reason. And I started writing down 10 ideas a day. And within a few weeks, I felt like my neurons were like on fire or something. Like creativity is a muscle. And like any muscle, it will atrophy almost instantly if you don't regularly exercise.

And people don't realize that. They think, oh, when inspiration hits me, I'll know. That's totally not true. Inspiration doesn't just like strike like lightning. You have to have a well-developed idea muscle to be there when inspiration hits. So I started writing down 10 ideas a day, most of them bad because who's going to come up with, it's hard to come up with even one or two good ideas a year. So most of my ideas were bad, but you just get in the rhythm of writing down ideas. And so I started generating lots of ideas, but then I realized some of my ideas were really combinations of older ideas. So I might have one

technique from one thing, but applied it to another thing. And boom, the intersection I'm the best in the world at. So I know a guy who's a standup comedian, but he's very young. He wouldn't normally be one of the top comedians out there, but this guy can get booked in every comedy club in the world. And the reason is because ever since he was a little kid, he's been freestyle rapping just for fun he was like you and so now he has an act where he asked for the audience to give him five words random words and so people in the audience shout out five random words and i've tested him personally to make sure he wasn't like had had the chills in the audience yeah like in in my podcast i had everybody who was in the room

throw out a word and he says okay give me beat. And instantly he comes up with this like super intellectual, but he doesn't miss a beat. He uses all five words. He raps. He could do it for like on and on. He could just keep rapping. Somehow he knows about. We gave him volcanoes on Mars, the choose yourself book or James Altucher. We gave him a whole bunch of things that had nothing to do with each other.

And he weaved them together into one story. and then he wrapped it to a beat. So everything rhymed and it was amazing. But he basically, he took rap, had to have sex with comedy. And now he's the best or maybe the only comedy rapper in the world. And he performs at every standup club in the world, which is not an easy thing to do because you have to get approved. And so that's another example of idea sex. But here's my favorite example, though, is my favorite disco song, of course, is Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees. It was the theme song to Saturday Night Fever. And in the 90s, one of my favorite rap bands was the Fugees. Y. Clef still performs and Lauryn Hill and so on. And fujis took the song staying alive and made a cover of it using rap maybe they made a rap version of staying alive and of course that's

like the most obvious thing that's going to be a number one billboard hit a million a billion people like the song staying alive another billion people like the fujis combine them and idea sex gives you whatever the name of the song was you keep staying alive and it was the number one hit so it worked and that's why our movies are pitched oh it's star wars meets the the last testament of christ or whatever that's good that you defined that for me i was thinking idea sex is what i suggested my eighth wife one time was like so i'm thinking i've got an idea for sex, honey, maybe you and your sister, and that didn't go over well. So now I have a ninth wife.

Yeah, not all idea sex works, but some of it, sometimes it does, and it has surprising results when you do idea sex. I've got to tell you, the results were surprising, though. So you are true there. This is pretty cool. You mentioned earlier talking about coaching, and I'm on, I don't know if you're on Clubhouse, the the clubhouse app there's a lot of coaching going on there a lot of coaches and

stuff in fact i didn't i'm not really too into the industry so i didn't realize how much there was is that really a good big way to jump start your knowledge base because you're hiring people that know more than you and can help you as you call it uh skip the line it depends like there's these things like these life coaches. I don't think that's very useful. Maybe it is for some people. Maybe it isn't. I shouldn't judge. Maybe some people really like seeing a life coach and they don't really need the other version, which is, let's say, a therapist or something. But I think there probably are some good life coaches out there. But I'm really not talking about that at all. Take chess as an example. There are very specific things like hard

skills that you need to learn and you can either read them in a book or you can watch videos or you can learn them direct from a coach. So let's say you have to solve a complicated chess position. It's good for a coach to walk you through the basic skills needed. Or let's say you're playing basketball and you want to learn how to play. It's good to have a coach show you something as simple as how do you dribble without looking down at the ground? That's hard. Or if you're driving a race car and you want to learn how, you don't just jump in a car and go in a race. You could die. You learn, okay, here's how you hug the corners. It's different. It's counterintuitive. Here's how you speed past somebody. It's also counterintuitive and so on. You need coaches for things like that.

But a life coach is just telling you, don't forget to take cold showers in the morning and be grateful every day. And by the way, those things are probably true, but okay, I could read that in a 30 page book and then move on with my life. I hired a life coach once and they fired me. They said, your life sucks ass. There's nothing I can do with this. So I didn't want to take the chance that you would be a bad testimonial.

They're like, yeah, you're unsavable at this point there's no there's no help you should just god i don't know anyway anything more you want to touch on in the book before we go out i just think that in today's day and age right now more than ever people have taken a step back for better or for worse again because of this pandemic and these economic lockdowns they've taken a step back and they said, do I really want to do what I'm doing? And in some cases, the answer is yes. And in some cases, the answer is no. Like I know one person who quit his job trading bonds because he wanted to write a newsletter about interesting stories combining sports and finance. So again, idea sex, he took the newsletter approach as opposed to writing a

book because you can make a little bit more money with the newsletter and that's understanding the field. And nobody was writing about interesting stories of about the intersection of sports and finance. So he created a new industry out of the intersection of those two things. And now he's the best in the world at it. So eight months later, I'll give you an example story he wrote. He might take like the Super Bowl halftime. There was the performer was this guy called, his name is The Weeknd. And The Weeknd, I didn't know this,

but The Weeknd apparently did not get paid for performing the Super Bowl halftime. And in fact, The Weeknd used $7 million of his own money to help produce his show. And so this guy wrote all about the economics of halftime and why this guy would do that and what Beyonce did, what Maroon 5 did when they performed in the halftime. Anyway, long story short, he has 27,000 subscribers.

He just started eight months ago. He quit his job at J.P. Morgan trading bonds. His newsletter is called Huddle Up. Anybody should get it. It's really fun. I'm not even interested in it. I hate sports. I'm not interested in it at all, but I love reading about it.

And it's an example of taking the intersection of two fields that he was pretty good in and becoming the best in the world at the intersection. There you go. So you can learn so much from the book and stuff. One other question I have from our audience. I never heard about this, so I don't know the context of it. But ask him about his Bitcoin to one million prediction. Is that still a thing? So I first went on CNBC in, I think it was May or June 2013.

Yeah, it was in May 2013. Bitcoin was $61 a coin. And I was selling my book, Choose Yourself. I made a Bitcoin-only store where I only accepted Bitcoin. And I was selling my book a month in advance of its release to people who had Bitcoin. And I said on CNBC then, I didn't make the prediction then, but I said, this is something that people should consider investing in. And someone said, did you just, one of the anchors said, did you just do this as a marketing ploy to say you're the best author, the best selling

author in history of Bitcoin only? And I said, well, I'm on national TV, so it worked. And you shouldn't argue with that. And they never had me on again, but that's okay. No, actually, they had me on several years later, because then I went on in 2017, September 2017, Bitcoin was at $3,500. And I said, look, if Bitcoin even replaces gold, or becomes a small percentage of the currency in the world. There's $150 trillion of paper currency, and there's only $100 billion worth of Bitcoin at that time. And I said, if it's even a small percentage of the market cap of gold or the value of all the currency in the world, Bitcoin could easily top a million or even 5 million. And a lot of of people presumably even this guy who asked you this

a lot of people were laughing at me like this guy's ridiculous but that's good because a lot of people were like who's this guy you think they were you can't skip the line about bitcoin we're software developers we should be on cnbc talking about bitcoin not you and by the way i'm a software developer but that's besides the point and yeah i think i this the story remains the same i love all these like pundits and commentators that switch opinions every time there there's a new news story i have this i i pretty much unless something radically changes i pretty much keep my opinions like most people do and stick with them and so i have very few opinions and the ones i do have i've thought about and researched.

And Bitcoin is very interesting for a lot of reasons we don't have to go into now. But it's, again, the main thing here is there's a lot of demand for it. Elon Musk is buying billions. Every public company is buying billions of Bitcoin. There's a lot of demand. Supply is limited.

So yeah, it's going to replace some portion of the world's currency at some point. And it's gone from 3500 to 60,000 in the past 12 months even yeah i just pulled it up it's uh almost it's 58 710 that's a long way from 61 or 62 you were talking about so yeah so people sometimes say you were wrong about the timing like you said by the end of 2020 or the end of 2021 and i'm like okay are you complaining you're up 10x right now from where you were like you had to find something wrong with like all right i'm not nostradamus i'm not

a prophet like but i have an opinion that's it this is crazy how some people are the jealousy and all that sort of good stuff so you've got a total of 18 books now right yeah never remember that riley a little bit more actually because there's some that i did under pseudonyms i don't So you've got a total of 18 books now, right? Yeah. Never heard of that, Riley. A little bit more, actually, because there's some that I did under pseudonyms I don't tell people about. Okay. Are those romance novels? Okay. Can I tell you about one more experiment I did?

Yeah, you can. So I was curious about Fifty Shades of Grey, which on the surface is a horrible novel. I don't think E.L. James, the author, would disagree with it. I don't think anyone would disagree with me. It is a poorly written novel. I don't think E.L. James, the author, would disagree with it. I don't think anyone would disagree with me. It is a poorly written novel. But clearly it's done something because it's almost the best-selling novel in history. And I remember I was talking to somebody who works at Amazon. This was like in September of maybe 2014. And she was telling me that – or no, maybe it was 20 – yeah, no, maybe it was 2013.

Anyway, she was telling me that month one out of every two was 20. Yeah, no, maybe it was 2013. Anyway, she was telling me that month, one out of every two books sold in bookstores was Fifty Shades of Grey and around the world. And so here's what I did. Here's the experiment I did. I don't know how to write a romance novel. I don't even know if I've ever read a classic romance novel. But I took Fifty Shades of Grey and I took a thesaurus and I used Fiverr. So for $20, I hired somebody to basically rewrite Fifty Shades of Grey except replace every single word with a synonym.

So instead of it was like she ran home to take her tests. It would be replaced by a sentence, Jill hurried to her dormitory to finish her exams. And so the entire book was the 50 shades of gray but with synonyms and then i experimented with self-publishing on amazon so i uploaded it to amazon i picked the cover i think if i remember correctly this was a long time ago so i have trouble remembering if i remember correctly it was called maybe diary of a shy girl i can't even remember i use a pseudonym okay it's funny about this bit is i was gonna ask you i was gonna do a bit saying what did you do i read a gray novel and you did i did yeah okay no sorry sorry here's

what it's called it's by jackie king how to satisfy a billionaire the story of a shy girl and here here's it's got one review it's got one massive review from two years ago oh an incredibly gripping original and sexy story told from the perspective of a girl played with the monotony of everyday life. What a chance opportunity allows her to step outside the mold. Brenda dares where lesser woman might cower. So I think he was making a joke.

But it's How to Satisfy a Billionaire. The cover is pretty racy, and it's by Jackie King, the great author Jackie King, who's me. And it's ranked number 188,661 in erotica. Wow. So yeah, that's pretty crazy. I can tell you in total, it sold about 60 copies.

There might be still a movie deal. I'm negotiating hard, but we'll see. There you go, man. It's been wonderful to have you on the show, James. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and where to order up the book. Yeah. Skip the Line can be ordered at Amazon or anywhere that you buy books, Barnes & Noble, whatever.

And you can find me on Altucher, A-L-T-U-C-H-E-R, on Instagram or J Altucher on Twitter or the James Altucher Show is my podcast. But definitely listen to Chris Voss's – actually, not only listen to Chris Voss's podcast, but subscribe to it because people don't realize how much it benefits the podcaster when you subscribe to their podcast. And do it on iTunes, whether you have an iPhone or not, because that's really where it matters. Right now, I'm going to iTunes, Chris Vosho, and I am subscribing to your podcast. Awesome sauce. That'll be good because then you'll know when your podcast gets out here in the next 48 hours.

That'll be good. I'll get a download. There you go. I'm literally going to subscribe right now. Alright. I'm just going to let the dead air go for the funny. I'm on my phone. You have to

do it on your phone. I hate the fact the phone rules everything now. I still on my phone. You have to go on your phone. I hate the fact that the phone rules everything now. I still like my desktop. I'm getting sold. I have trouble seeing the phone anymore. Like I said before, I didn't get your message from your publicist an hour before because I was getting my eyes done. They look beautiful, by the way. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. That's really what I was hoping good job i try and make the eyes match the background of the chris voss show so let me see hold on i'm going chris i'm on my iphone chris voss show all podcasts here we do it the first thing that came up by the way was dan carl i'm gonna do a segment every show i think out of this where i'm gonna force every interviewee at the end of the show to subscribe i'm like i want to see you do it now i'm a subscriber oh it just popped up the word subscribe how can we prove that i'm subscribed we will take your word for it james

no look um next yeah it gives me the choice to unsubscribe now there you go thank you very much sir i'm deeply honored that you would uh find our show appropriate i'm sure you'll listen to a few episodes and regret your choice you just made no i'm all into it oh thank you very much james for being on the show and spending some time with us sharing this knowledge and getting us smarter thank you very much i i appreciate thank. Thank you. Thank you. And my audience, be sure to check out James, check out all of his books, but to check out his latest book that he has up to offer. It's just fresh off the Amazon and the beautiful things with the Amazon, you can skip the line at the bookstore, skip the line, the 10 10 000 experiments rule and other surprising advice for reaching your

goals just came out in february 23rd so you can still get that book enjoy it and tell everybody you're smarter than they are once you read it thanks for tuning in go to youtube.com for us that's chris voss see the video version this broadcast you can also go to goodreads.com for us chris voss see we're reading over there. Also go to Facebook, Instagram, all those different groups we have on LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.