The Rich Roll Podcast - James Altucher On The Art of Thinking Differently — Adventures In Minimalism, Stand Up Comedy & Crypto-Currency

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

When someone fires off a long list of occupations in conversation, my instinct tells me that person probably isn’t great at any of them. James Altucher is not that guy. A hugely successful blogger, podcaster, public speaker, stand up comic, investor, entrepreneur and former VC & hedge fund manager with eighteen books to his name — including the Wall Street Journal bestseller Choose Yourself* (my personal favorite) — James is an abundantly talented polymath impacting millions of people across the world with his wry wit and often counter-intuitive ideas, all delivered with a perfect mix of intelligent insight, relatable self-deprecation and perfect comedic timing. Oh yeah, he’s also a nationally ranked chess master. Returning for his third appearance on the podcast, James is one of the smartest and most interesting intellects I know — a tremendously inspiring thinker with compelling, often controversial ideas on everything from college (don’t go), career (create your own), creativity (generate 10 new ideas every day) and finances (he’s made millions and lost millions several times over). What I find most captivating and irresistable about James is his courageous sincerity —  the willingness to write with such incredible honesty and vulnerability. It's not only laudable, it's the connective glue that keeps his 20 million readers hooked. In accordance with his mantra that you can't write until you do, James puts his theories into action. Case in point? To explore minimalism he gave away all of his possessions save 15 items stuffed in a modest-sized duffle bag, and couch-surfed AirBnB's for almost two years — an adventure that landed him on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Styles section. A ubiquitous presence on the internet, James and his writing have appeared in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Observer, Techcrunch, The Financial Times, Yahoo Finance, CNBC and others. His blog, JamesAltucher.com, has attracted more than 20 million readers since its launch in 2010. The James Altucher Show debuted as the #1 podcast on all of iTunes in 2014 and regularly appears in the top 100 podcasts on iTunes. Equal parts peer, friend and mentor, James is someone I could literally talk to all day about any subject. So it's no surprise that this conversation is wide-ranging, traversing everything from what makes a great podcast to his thoughts on crypto currency. In between, we cover his exploits with minimalism, his opinions on education and his recent adventures immersed in the world of stand up comedy. I love James. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. Peace + Plants, Rich

My goal is really I want to be better by the end of the podcast. And so I feel like if I'm an improved person by the end of the podcast, and so are the listeners. Think about like all those hundreds of hours talking and researching peak performers. It's going to have an effect on how you live your life. And hopefully for the listeners as well, they'll get a sense of that too, and it'll affect them. But I know for me, it's just changed the way I think about everything

from food, nutrition, exercise, my relationships, a huge effect on my creativity, my spirituality and open-mindedness because I've talked to people of every discipline and faith, my sense of what's important in business. I don't know, it's changed my life in every way. That's James Altucher, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How's it going? How are you feeling? Are you doing good? Are you ready to receive? I hope so. If so, you're in the right place because this is the show where I do my very best to share conversations that matter with the world's most compelling minds across

a wide swath of categories, everything from health, wellness, nutrition, and fitness to environmentalism to creative expression and personal and professional development. My name is Rich Roll. This is a podcast. It's my podcast. Welcome aboard. Before we get into it, one quick housekeeping announcement. I am very excited to announce that Julie and I have a brand new cookbook coming out April 24th. It's called The Plant Power Way Italia. If you enjoyed our first cookbook, the Plant Power Way, then you are going to freak for this one because it is next level across the board. Super proud of it. We just revealed the cover the other day. It's absolutely gorgeous. Really inspired by

our experiences in the Italian countryside hosting these retreats. It's also packed with 125 never-before-seen delicious plant-based recipes. You guys are going to love it. And it would mean a great deal to me if you pre-ordered it now from your favorite online bookseller. For more information, you can check it out on my site or on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, wherever you buy books. And we're going to be doing some public events soon or around the launch, I should say, and I'll keep you posted as that schedule develops. So returning for his third appearance on the show is my friend, James Altucher. You might recall our first conversation in the very early days of this program, episode 75, as well as episode 165, which was a round table conversation with James, myself, my wife, Julie, and his then wife, Claudia. I've also been a guest on James's show, I think twice at this point. And you could

check that out on his podcast, The James Altucher Show. So James, for those less familiar, is many things. Like how do I describe him? This guy does so much. He is first and foremost, a prodigiously talented writer. He's also a podcast host, an investor, a serial entrepreneur who has started and run over 20 companies. He is a former VC and hedge fund manager, as well as a chess master. He's basically just one of the smartest and most interesting intellects that I know. Somebody who is perhaps best known these days as really an inspiring thinker with very compelling and often counterintuitive ideas on everything from college, he says, don't go, to career, create your own to creativity. He starts each day by writing down 10 ideas on a waiter's pad to money. He's a guy who's made millions and lost millions several times over.

But I think what makes James most interesting to me personally is first and foremost, his incredible creative output. This is a guy who writes every single day, churning out insightful blog posts with incredible regularity and somebody who's authored, I don't know how many books at this point, but I think 18 books. If you haven't read any of his books, I suggest starting with my favorite amongst them called Choose Yourself, which was a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a book that hit number one on Amazon upon its release, which is amazing. Also, you know, James is somebody who has this capacity, this deep willingness to be incredibly honest and vulnerable in his writing. He literally turns himself inside out. And I find that

laudable. And I think it makes his message so relatable and compelling. Also, I like the fact that he puts his thought experiments into action, like his exploration with minimalism, where he gave away all of his possessions, save what he could fit in a single duffel bag and ended up living out of Airbnbs for, I think, two years. And that was a story that was chronicled on the front page of the Sunday New York Times style section. I'll put a link in the show notes to that. You should read it. It's a great article. In any event, James is ubiquitous on the internet and 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. This conversation is super fun, and there's a few more things I want to say about it and James before we dig in. But first... We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well

just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com

who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether

you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life and recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, James Altucher. Someone I consider a peer, a friend, a mentor of sorts, and just a fascinating person at large. James is somebody I could literally talk to all day about anything. I could listen to him read the phone book. And not that we're doing that today, because this is a fairly wide-ranging, sort of agenda- free conversation about a wide variety of subjects,

everything from minimalism to education to life transformation to Bitcoin, which I should say was a conversation recorded prior to the more recent market adjustments, just so you know, in any event. And that being said, I sincerely hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. So without further ado, I give you James Altucher. I sincerely hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. So without further ado, I give you James Altucher. So I do the intro stuff later, so we can just go right into it. Yeah. By the way, can we keep that, what you just said?

Of course. We can keep that in. I do no editing, James. Yeah. I prefer that. So great to see you again. Yeah. I think the first time we did a podcast together,

before anyone even knows my name here, I think it was in 2014, early 2014, and it was on the phone or Skype. Yeah, I think that was back when I was doing Skype interviews. And yeah, we did that one by Skype. Ben, I think we did one in person, or we did one with both you and Julie. I know we did that one by Skype. Ben, I think we did one in person, or we did one with both you and Julie. I know we did that. Yeah, I know we did that, but I think I did yours, but was that in person?

It might have been. We've done this three times maybe, four times, I don't know, I can't remember. But it's been a while. It's been like a year and a half or something like that since then. And I'll tell you why it's been a year and a half, but introduce me first. Like I said, I do the intros before, so I will do this beautiful introduction about you and your life beforehand. I owe you an apology. Why? Because last time we got together, we were talking about different ways to work together. And I know there was a phone call. You talked to somebody I work with and we didn't quite figure out a way.

You know what happened? I ended up selling a piece of my business to something else. So I got distracted, and I never really followed up with you. So I feel like I owe you an apology on that. I feel bad. No apology necessary. Yeah, we had a meeting about a potential business thing, and then I talked to one of your guys about a thing,

and somehow it kind of fell off the radar, and there wasn't a lot of follow-up. And I've learned in my experience, I don't get caught up in these sorts of things. I just feel like if these things are supposed to happen, they happen relatively seamlessly. And if it's a situation in which you feel like you have to force things to move forward, then it probably isn't the right repository of your energy anyway. So, like, I just thought, well, the timing's wrong on this or whatever. James is doing other things. And if this is supposed to happen, it will. And if it doesn't, it doesn't.

And we're sitting here talking today. There was like a layer of things that happened that had nothing to do with what we were talking about. And then I just felt bad, which is like a typical way I kind of lose touch with people. But I'm glad we got back in touch and we're sitting here. Let me alleviate you of any guilt, James. Good. Thank you. No, I'm delighted to be talking to you today.

I'm glad you responded to my email, which is why we're here, which is cool. Yeah, because you had Lance Armstrong. I have Floyd Landis. Same day. The same day. I just couldn't believe it. It's even more bizarre because Floyd Landis is such an unlikely guest for you, for your show. And I was like, I can't believe Floyd's going to be on his own team today.

Yeah, it makes more sense for you to have Lance Armstrong than for me to have Floyd Landis, who, just in case people don't know, kind of quote-un unquote won the 2006 Tour de France the year after Lance Armstrong stopped winning them. And then several years later was the whistleblower on Lance Armstrong in terms of the whole doping scandal. Right. I thought you did a great job with that interview, especially as somebody who probably doesn't know that much about cycling. I don't know anything about cycling at all. It was super interesting. And I thought Floyd was very articulate and well-spoken on the pertinent issues. Yeah, and I didn't want to be with all those types of things because I don't know the emotional battles that maybe might have occurred historically. They've known each other for 20 years or around that.

I want to make sure I'm as balanced as possible in those interviews while still, I mean, Floyd was nice. He was on the podcast and I wanted to get the story, but you know, I understand always there's always more than one side to any story. I think that was my approach with Lance as well. It was something I said to him before the interview, and I believe I even said it in the introduction, which was that I don't have an ax to grind or an agenda. Like, I'm just interested, you know, like I'm just, I'm interested in the story. And I approach these conversations from a place of no judgment or, you know, to the closest extent possible to have no judgment, just pure like curiosity. Yeah. And to get any, I think, I think our podcasts are about similar topics and we maybe

approach it from slightly different angles, but I think both are about how do you achieve peak or better, or at least better performance in life. And we talked to a lot of peak performers. So here are two guys who have reached the top of the world, particularly Lance Armstrong, but also Floyd Landis to an extent. They reached the top of the world in this incredibly competitive sport, cycling, a sport I know nothing about and have no interest at all in. But there was also this news-like aspect to the story as well. But I wanted to get a little insight too into how do you become the best in the world at something? And I think we both talked to a lot of people who are the best in the world at what they do. And I think we both talked to a lot of people who are the best in the world at what they do.

Yeah, we were talking a little bit about this before the podcast. And one of the things I said to you is that, you know, my approach is always to try to get to the emotional heart of it. And that's like my priority, that that has to come before the information. And we're kind of talking about like what makes a good podcast and why a lot of podcasts aren't good. And the idea that like most people who are conducting these conversations, like they're not listening, they're not present for what's happening. Or they don't have a sense of what the heart of the story is. Like everybody's got kind of a little bit of the arc of the hero in them. and they're at some point on that journey. And when you're interviewing someone, you kind of have to make sure you're on the arc a little bit.

You're not off arc. You're not both talking about something that is completely unrelated to that person's journey in life. And so I think that's how you get that emotional connection. And so when you're getting ready to speak to somebody for your show, like what, what is your process of preparation and what are you trying, like, what's your approach, like your overall kind of, um, perspective on how to like crack somebody open? Well, and that's an interesting phrase, like crack somebody open. Uh, it's not like I'm trying to, to necessarily break them because my goal is really I want to be better

by the end of the podcast. And so I feel like if I'm an improved person by the end of the podcast, then so are the listeners. And I'll usually, I'll try to read everything they've done. I'll try to listen to maybe other podcasts they've been on or that they've been doing. If they've done a TED Talk recently, I'll listen to that. If they've written stuff recently, I'll read that, like articles or things. And then I'll just in general think about

what is this person's real story? So there's always the story they write and tell, and then there's the real story. And the story they write and tell is not necessarily a bad story. It's not a lie. I always say there's the good story and the real story. So the good story is not a lie. It's a good story. But then I also want to find out, I want to think about what's the real story is and get them talking about that a little bit. And that's how you get the most impact. Give them a little bit of their good story and then try to get the real story. And when you're thinking about who to have on, what are your criteria for selecting the people that you choose to talk to? So this has changed over time, but I'm really interested in someone who actually does

the things. They do peak performance. So they've experienced it. They do it. They don't just write about it. So it's very easy. For instance, I could write a book. Here's what every quarterback in the NFL has in common. And if you do this, maybe it's interesting

and maybe you'll be a better athlete. Meanwhile, I don't know anything about the NFL or quarterbacks or athletics or anything and uh so it's very easy for me to write like fancy sports stories just with a little bit of research but it'd be useless for me to talk about it on a podcast you wouldn't really learn anything the listeners wouldn't really gain from that and they probably wouldn't gain from me writing a book about that either, but I could probably write that book. And I originally would have bestselling authors if I couldn't get the doers. And I realized very quickly, the bestselling authors don't necessarily do what their books are about. And so I'm more interested in people who have earned the right to write their story, if that makes sense.

So, you know, in your case, you experienced these life changes, this reinvention in your life that led to, you know, your ultra marathons and everything else that's happening in your life. And you wrote about it. So that's an example of a writer that I would be interested in. So that's an example of a writer that I would be interested in. Whereas if someone just says, okay, I have a PhD in, I don't know, psychopaths. And here's all these academic studies. Can you get that PhD? Probably.

Somewhere, right? So, look, there are probably very good, like, again, with someone like that, I'd want to know, okay, what's their actual personal experience with psychopaths? Are they therapists that have cured this or helped people deal with psychopaths? So I want to know the doing and not the academic studies. You'd rather talk to Clarice who actually worked with Clarice from Silence of the Lambs. She was exactly. She was actually in that position, like dealing with the psychopath firsthand. Yeah, so for instance-

In a high performance way. Yeah, so for instance, in that sense, because you made me think of the FBI just there, I did have someone who was like a high level, three initial agency sort of person and knew an extreme amount about the hacking that is occurring in the world right now for very good reasons. He knew about it. We distorted his voice and we did a podcast about it because he doesn't just, there's a lot of people who write about

the hacking world who I can read the book. I have a technology background, so I can read the books and I can tell these people don't actually know anything. Here's someone I could talk to who knows and is actually a peak performer in the hacking world and knows what's happening throughout the planet. And I can learn from it, too. Like, what did it take for him to get that good and to be that involved? And then I also can help on a news aspect. What's really fake news and what's real and what are concerns and what are not. And then I learn and the listeners learn and so on. But there are plenty of people who write books about it who know nothing. Right. Well, you're very good at the podcast. I always

love enjoying, I always enjoy listening to it. And it's been cool just over the last couple of weeks to see who you've had on, because in addition to Floyd Lannis, you had Anthony Irvin on, who's my friend, who I had on my show as well. And I was like, that's another one where I was like, I wouldn't have expected James to have Anthony on,

but his story is so amazing. I was so delighted that you had him on. And then- I think I did a good job with him. I have to listen to your podcast with him. I listen to your friends with him. I'm sure yours was actually much better. Well, the one that we had

was before the Olympics. So it was before he won this latest gold. It's probably a little bit longer, but yeah, check it out. See, and there's an intriguing thing. It's like he didn't just go all out as a kid, was talented, had great coaches, win a gold, and then move on to the next part of his life. He stopped in this sport for 16 years he broke the record for the the longest time span between winning a goal two different gold medals i mean he's overall i think he won four or five but

he broke that record and it's just a fascinating story to me how do you get that level of peak performance back up um yeah and in between that period of time it's not like he was swimming the whole time right he was having a lot of troubles. He was in a band. He was like, he went down a dark rabbit hole for a while and, you know, traveled the world, did all kinds of crazy stuff, started smoking cigarettes. Like, it's just the arc of like what transpired in between those Olympic victories is really quite staggering. Because I think in addition to peak performance, if someone is a doer rather than a writer,

they have a story. So like a writer, unless I'm talking about their process of writing, there's not the story. They've written other stories. I want to hear from Anthony Irvin in this case, what was that story between those two gold medals as opposed to, you know, I don't know, any number of other guests I could have had.

Like, his story intrigued me. But you're right, I've had more, not that I focus on this, but for the first time ever, I've had more sports figures on, just because I've recently hired a full-time podcast producer who is fascinated with sports. He's a big sports guy. Yeah, so I had on Bill Cartwright, I had on Anthony Irvin, I've had on Floyd Landis, all these people I've never heard their name

before even. And it's been great because those are definitely peak performers, all those sports figures. And I've learned a lot. I like this idea of being interested in doers. My experience is that athletes are inherently doers because that's what they do. They do. They're not writing about it. They're actually physically moving their bodies. That's technically doing, right? But sometimes if you're too much of a doer,

then you're less reflective about the doing. And I've had, sometimes it's tricky having conversations with athletes because they're so immersed in a subculture as opposed to somebody who's in a more sort of intellectual pursuit who has a little bit more reflective ability or capacity. I think that's right.

I think that's why I haven't had as many athletes on the podcast like I Remember and it also depends when they became when they started to become aware of their superior performance how old they were so like for instance having Tony Hawk on was very complicated because Practically from birth that guy was doing, you know Flips on his skateboard. I said yes, I'm like, how do you do that? He couldn't he can't tell you that any more than how he tells you how he digests food right it's like it's like i wouldn't

have brad pitt on and ask him how do you pick up girls because that would be a useless podcast there would be like zero actual information you can get out of that even though he might be the world champion of like meeting girls or women sorry so what has this podcast you know journey meant to you like because we've been on similar arcs you started yours you know around the same time that i started mine yeah probably i started mine probably like late q3 2013 i started building a backlog and then I launched on January 2nd 2014 you were in 2012 so you were a little before mine um I do I I think I probably caught up on hours just because I do three a week right now yeah I don't know how you do that I don't know either well we'll see we'll

see but I love doing it though uh it's like you were saying um it's almost like this amazing it's almost like a scam that we get to do this because we get to, I get to call up anybody in the world. I mean, I get to call up my childhood heroes, even. Like I called up Judy Blume, who I read every single one of her books when I was a kid. And somehow, who would have thought when I was in fourth and fifth grade, reading tales of a fourth grade nothing, that one day i was going to actually talk to this amazing woman who sold 150 million copies of her books most of them to me when i was a kid and my friends so that's just one example and then you get to and then you get to share that with all

kinds of people who appreciate you know appreciate it yeah it's, it's really been enriching to my life in countless ways. Like I can't, it's like, I almost can't imagine not having or not having done it, what my life would be like. Well, think about like all those hundreds of hours talking and researching peak performers. It's going to have an effect on how you live your life. And hopefully for the listeners as well, they'll, they'll get a sense of that too, and it'll affect them. But I know for me, it's just changed the way I think about everything from food, nutrition, exercise, my relationships, my creativity, a huge effect on my creativity, my spirituality and open-mindedness. my spirituality and open-mindedness because I've talked to people of every discipline and faith and business my sent my my sense of what's important in business I don't know it's changed my life probably in every in every way and I don't think even people realize that because from day it's sort of like when

you're growing you don't people don't see oh he grew a micrometer but like every day I feel it changes me and you know I I don't know, oh, he grew a micrometer. But every day I feel it changes me. And I don't know if people around me know it, but it does. People ask me, what is the information that you've really leveraged from your guests and put into work in your own life? And what have you discarded? And I don't ever have a really good answer for that because it's not like I make a list. And it's just sort of an osmosis sort of thing. And these things just tend to percolate into my life almost without effort. Yeah, I think that's right.

I think some aspects of it, because it's not like you're going to become an Olympic swimmer, right, after doing a podcast with Anthony Irvin. after doing a podcast with Anthony Irvin, but some aspect of his discipline, his work ethic, how he gets through his trials and problems, you listen to him and hear someone who was the best in the world at what he did and does, and some aspect of that, it can't help but filter in. Yeah, I think it's almost an unconscious thing with me. It's not like, well, I run up against a problem and I go, well, remember when so-and-so on the podcast said this is how he or she handles this problem? It's not like that. It's just, it's there swimming around in your unconscious mind. And I think it just impacts your behavior and how you perceive the world.

perceive the world. I'll tell you one thing though, which might be more concrete. Well, a couple of things. One is if you give me a category, I can tell you how the podcast probably helped me on that category. And I would say there's a couple of things that are probably common among everybody, but the most important being in addition to basic health, but the most important being the quality of the people they surround themselves with is extreme. I noticed that's always extremely important. Like who, who you're with, who you're, you're romantically with, like who's your life partner, who your friends are, who your business associates are, who your coaches are, that makes or breaks people. And it makes or breaks peak performance. It makes or breaks businesses. That's extremely important. And my circle has been improved by the podcast because a lot of

the people that I've had on, they become part of my life. They become mentors to me and friends and people that I can call on, which has been this my life. They become, you know, mentors to me and friends and people that I can call on, which has been this incredible benefit of that. Because other than, other than like my family, like this is my social interaction. Like me spending time with you today, like this is my big social event for the day. It just happens to be professional as well. But if we'd gone out to lunch, you know, we would, we're having a higher caliber exchange and conversation than we would be if we just went and hung out for a while. Yeah, I think that's true. It's the same thing for me because let's say some weeks I'm recording up to six podcasts a week, not releasing but recording, and I don't have time for any social life after that.

So it really does be – and now this is the fourth or fifth time we've been on a podcast together. That's more- This is the sum total of our friendship though. But if you think about it, I mean, I think we've hung out twice outside the podcast. One time at Pure Foods and Wine, one time at an apartment I was staying at

around the corner from here. But most people in our age don't really hang out with their adult friends you know it's not like you go over to each other's house and like ride a bicycle around like we're adults now we do lots of different things so this is really my social life is the podcast and then you know the one or two other activities I do in life right Right. So let's get into some of those activities. You know, I kind of see you, you're a very interesting dude because you're kind of category defying. I see you as sort of this pontificator at large on all manner of subjects and ideas.

But the word pontification is interesting because i don't want to make it seem like i'm closed-minded in the sense that i have a strong opinions but i'm always i'm always open minded to the opposite side i'm never i'm never dogmatic even on articles implying that i didn't mean to imply that uh it's not like i'm on a pedestal preaching. Right. I got you. So because if people disagree with me, I'm going to listen. Like, for instance, I don't think in general, most 18 year olds should go to college. But I haven't. And everybody would always ask me for years. I first said this 12 years ago. I wrote this in a column in the Financial Times. And 12 years ago, every 100 percent of people thought I was crazy. Now,

it's more of a discussion that you see in the media. And yet, I have an 18-year-old daughter. She really wanted to go to college. She really did not want to have the discussion at all. I would bring it up with her. She would literally turn around and walk away from me. I like that your daughter is rebelling against you by going to college. that your daughter is rebelling against you by going to college. It's true. And the thing is, turning around and walking away from me told me I wasn't really being a good father.

Instead, she should have been comfortable expressing her opinion with me and arguing about it or debating it, not arguing, but debating it with me. And so the conversation then would be i would have to rush after her don't you know turn your back on me but here's what we'll do i'll give you in cash the tuition for your next year all you've got to do is watch a movie a day with me and then we talk about it for like 20 minutes afterwards and then you can go off and do whatever you want and i'll give you that cash that i would have spent on college and she did say i'll think about it but then she

said i really want to go to college but the whole interaction made me think you know what the fact that she felt she had to not talk to me about that she had to walk away made me think i wasn't being open-minded enough so that she felt comfortable having the conversation. And so since then, we've been able to have the conversation in a more, in a nicer way. So does that, are you saying sort of between the lines there, what I'm getting out of that is, I mean, you're, you're somebody with a very large personality. You're very charismatic. And do you feel like that was, that overwhelmed her or made her feel like she couldn't communicate with you openly and honestly without reprisal or? Yeah, I think her feel like she couldn't communicate with you openly and honestly without reprisal? Yeah, I think she felt like she couldn't communicate with me honestly,

like that I was too single-minded about it, which I was. I mean, I even wrote a book. You're the guy. You can't backtrack from this position. Right, I wrote a book, 40 Alternatives to College, and I've written a ton of articles about it. So I think she felt she couldn't have the conversation. Now it's really gratifying to me when I had to think about my parenting style and I always got along with them. We never would yell, but it's gratifying

to me that both my kids could have the conversation with me when they disagree with me. And that shows me that they feel comfortable having an adult conversation as they become adults. They should be able to have an adult conversation with one of the closest adults to them, which is their father. Fatherhood is more important to me than winning an argument. This sort of counterintuitive idea that college is overrated, people shouldn't go to college, most people shouldn't go to college, etc. is one of those counterculture notions that has sort of put you on the zeitgeist map as somebody with an opinion. And you have a couple other ones like this. map as somebody with an opinion. And you have a couple other ones like this. I mean, Choose Yourself is all about sort of rethinking the job market and what it means to be a professional. And now you've kind of dipped your toe into cryptocurrency and you're sharing some thoughts

about that. It seems like they're ruffling some feathers also. Like you have this idea that Bitcoin could go to a million dollars. Yeah. I mean, it's funny, the whole cryptocurrency thing, because I really spent a long time... People say to me, oh, it's like out of nowhere you're talking about this. Actually, I was probably the first person on CNBC ever to talk about Bitcoin. In 2013, when I first published Choose Yourself, which I did in a very choose yourself fashion, I self-published it rather than the whole idea of choosing yourself, which I still strongly believe in and always will, is that don't wait for the gatekeepers to choose you. If you want to write a book and you're waiting for some big publisher to say, here's your big book deal,

you're probably making a mistake. Like you probably should look at how you can do this yourself and put your best effort into it and create something magical than waiting for someone to allow you to do something magical. And so in order to, part of it for me was, okay, I liked the idea of Bitcoin back then. And so I created on my own a store that, a month before I released the book to yourself I created a Bitcoin only store probably the first Bitcoin only store ever created and I sold choose yourself on it and what was funny was I had quite a few people buy choose yourself with Bitcoin almost all of them were employees of Amazon how really interesting to me but but then I went on CNBC to talk about it because no one really had talked about Bitcoin on CNBC at this point.

And Bitcoin was only 60 bucks. Now it's like 11,000. And I remember Herb Greenberg said to me, he was an anchor on CNBC, and he said, did you only do this for marketing purposes? And I said, well, I'm on national television right now, so you tell me. And so, of course, it was partly for marketing. It's not like I'm going to sell a million books through Bitcoin, but it gave me a lot of experience with Bitcoin and exposure to it and knowledge about it.

And now I can say, here's proof. Back in 2013, I was following this. You were talking about it then. Yeah, talking about it then and seeing what was interesting about it. It's interesting how these trends work. Like six months ago, the average consumer wasn't really thinking about or talking about Bitcoin very much. And then as it started to inch up and inch up, as we progressed towards Thanksgiving, suddenly it was everybody's talking about it. It's everywhere.

Suddenly it was everybody's talking about it. It's everywhere. And as somebody who's kind of looked at it from an arm's length for a while, I first bought Bitcoin and it was like maybe two and a half years ago. And I was broke and I sold it all and I thought it was all gone. And then I realized I still have 0.3 of a Bitcoin. So I was very excited about that. That's good. Hold on to it.

Yeah, I'm going to hold on to it. But then I started talking to some friends who know a lot about this stuff and i have yet to find anybody who can who can really explain what is happening in digestible lay person's terms because it all gets to like oh they start having the fork and these different camps and all this i was like i don't care i don't care about any of that so if you want want, I can explain it in layman's terms, because I agree with you that it shouldn't be explained ever in technology terms. But I want to say the reason why I started talking about it was because I saw that many of my kind of readers and listeners,

A, they were asking about it because the move was so hyperbolic up, you know, like since Thanksgiving, since October or September. But also I saw there are so many scams out there in every possible, just like any kind of new financial thing, there's going to be 95% of that world is going to be scam. And I wanted to do something for my readers that was not a scam. Now, and it's very complicated when you do that, because then everybody who is doing a scam is saying, no, you're the scam. So there's a lot of things. But what I do to combat that a little bit is 99% of what I say about Bitcoin I'll say absolutely for free so people could then judge whether I know anything or not and then you know

I might have a book or I hire someone to help me do more research and then you have to start if you build a business it's a business you start charging for stuff but most of what I say and write about Bitcoin I write completely for for free but because I was interested in telling people, hey, this is what it's really about. You know, ignore the speculation, try to ignore the bubble like aspects of it right now. And this is the long game that's happening. And so if you want, I feel like cryptocurrencies actually is a very small part of my life right now. No, I don't want to go too into the weeds on it.

But I know that you have like, because I get like 20 emails from you a day from all your email stuff. I don't even know how you have time to write all this stuff. And I don't, all the sales stuff, I have a company that does that stuff. But I know that you have this thing where you can teach people about Bitcoin. And I think the broader issue is that there is a need for somebody who can translate the principles in a way that the average consumer can comprehend and understand what's important to know about it, without getting stuck in the weeds about what blockchain is and all of that. So let me, I can explain it in less than five minutes. But the reason why it's so important to explain it in a non-technological way is if you ask people what's Amazon, nobody ever will say Amazon is a software application built on top of the TCP IP protocol, which is actually what Amazon is. They say Amazon's a store.

And you could buy books and then you suddenly you could buy other things there. You can buy everything there. And so it's, I don't know what their slogan is. Or talking about like, well, what is the dollar and getting into like it being gold backed and all of that, right? Yeah. So I have two very simple ways that I explain why this is happening. I mean, part of what's happening now is a little bit speculation, but I could explain why that speculation is happening as well. But I have kind of like a history of money way and I have an evolutionary way. So I'll start with that.

I'll do the evolutionary way. So if you look at every single industry, let's take like medicine. every single industry, let's take like medicine. Medicine, if you got sick a thousand years ago, you would think maybe I need to pray to God or go to my shaman or maybe I sinned so God afflicted me with some illness that I don't quite understand. You would have some theistic, you know,

God-based way of understanding your illness. So we sort of evolved from theism to humanism when humans became experts. They became doctors. So instead of praying to God to cure your illness, you'd go to a doctor and he would, you know, put a, what do you call it, a stethoscope or whatever on your chest and make you cough and hit your knee with a hammer. And I haven't been to a doctor since I was 18. So this is why I'm very, this is like, I'm thinking about- Do they still do that? Yeah. I'm thinking about when I last went to a doctor, it was my pediatrician. So

I haven't been to a doctor since, which is probably a mistake. But we kind of went from theism to humanism in medicine when we went from praying to God to cure us to having a doctor cure us. And now when we go, when something's wrong, when we go to the doctor, maybe the first thing we do is we get an EEG or a CAT scan or some kind of heart test. I don't know. What do you call the heart test? I don't know. EKG. Yeah.

Or they'll look at, you know, if they're very sophisticated, they'll look at genetic data and they'll look at your DNA. And so there's all sorts of data that is now better used in medicine. Data is better than humans at diagnosing serious illness and even prescribing because they could, you know, people with this kind of data use this medicine and got cured. So we've gone from theism to humanism to dataism in medicine. Same thing if you look at even, I don't know, like war. Two countries were going to war 2,000 years ago. They would pray to their gods. They would have sacrifices and whosoever god was more powerful, that would be the winner, supposedly. Then it's whoever had more humans on the ground and more bullets, like World War II in Europe,

if you had more humans on the ground, then you would win. So we went from theism to humanism. Now, every single day, there's a war being fought every day with data. I could tell you every company in the Fortune 500 in America and probably in every other country is being attacked constantly by forces in other countries and other institutions that we don't understand. I mean, there's a nonstop problem right now in Eastern Europe.

The electric grids of almost every Eastern European country is being attacked every day because they're built on technology that was made before cybersecurity became important. So it's just a nonstop battle, like in Poland or the Ukraine, how to keep their electric grid up when hackers are constantly 24 hours a day attacking them. And so we've gone to dataism to, again, from theism to humanism to dataism to fight our wars. So with money, if you look at the dollar bill, money is only as good as whether you could trust it enough

to take care of your transactions and store your wealth there. So you do two things with money. You buy a cup of coffee. We both have a cup of coffee in front of us. And you also store wealth in a bank as you save money. And so money has to be good for that. And you have to trust that the financial system will help you do that. So you look at the dollar bill, it's got in God we trust, which kind of is a relic of our theism background. Then you have a picture of George Washington. And maybe you have the Washington, I don't know, memorial or whatever.

Or you have people signing the Declaration of Independence. Or you have the Secretary of Treasury has his signature on there. None of these things mean anything. It's just on a piece of paper. But we trust it enough. Okay, this comes from the U.S. government. It's signed. It's got George a piece of paper, but we trust it enough. Okay, this comes from the US government. It's signed. It's got George Washington on it.

It's got that pyramid with an eye on it, just in case you're into that. So there's all these ways we get to trust the dollar. Well, okay, now we're going to go from, in God we trust, to eventually a dollar that is more database, because then you could avoid problems like forgery. So it's, you know, there's $200 million worth of forged currency in the United States. There's no forgery in, you know, Bitcoin. So every type of, every new generation of currency, like barter to gold to paper money to Bitcoin solves the problems of the old generation.

So paper money is lighter than gold and can be put in a bank and moved around electronically. Gold was better than barter because you can do everything in a gold transaction. And now Bitcoin solves the problem of forgery. It solves the problem of forgery. It solves the problem of double spending. It solves the problem of if I want to give you money, I don't have to go from my bank to the local reserve bank, through the Federal Reserve, to the wire system, to your bank, to your local reserve bank. I could just send you money and nobody knows. And it obviates any international currency fluctuations. Yeah, it solves all.

If you're in China and I'm here, it solves the whole international wiring system we bypass. Also, it's anonymous. So if I send you money now, cash money, everybody in between knows. And believe me, there's a lot of institutions who keep track of all those transactions from the IRS to the FBI. Also, there's fees. My bank has a fee. The local reserve bank has a fee. Your bank has a fee.

There's fees. It's like inflation built into any transaction. American Express has fees. With Bitcoin, fees can be kept to a minimum and some Bitcoin transactions have, or some cryptocurrency transactions have no fees. There's anonymity. So there's all these huge problems backed by a thousand man years of science,

which we don't even have to talk about, but there's all these huge problems that a database currency solves that paper money doesn't solve. And the anonymous thing is actually really important. So if you're the US government and you wanna sell $80 million worth of weapons to warlords in Afghanistan, do you really want to send that through the international wiring system and now China and

Russia and everyone else knows what you just did? No, you have to figure out some secretive way to do it. So no matter what the U.S. government or other officials say officially, the U.S. government and the Chinese government and the Chinese government and the Russian government, they're fully behind the development of these cryptocurrencies. I mean, not that they're behind it at the root, but they're supportive of it.

Because they can use it for their own nefarious purposes as needed. Yeah, who uses the dark web? So the dark web we always think is used by porn stuff or drug trafficking or whatever, but the U.S US government and other governments are probably the biggest users of kind of the parts of the web that are much more secretive. In what way? I didn't know that.

Yeah. For like information, how do you send information to people abroad that you wouldn't necessarily want to send, you know, on your government website or through email, which can be easily hacked, or you don't know if it's going to be hacked or not. So, or how do you, I don't know, again, fund people who you don't necessarily want other countries to know you're funding massive transactions abroad. Did you learn some of this from the FBI guy that you had on the podcast? Yeah, from several. Well, not only from him, but actually, so I'm involved in a lot of different cryptocurrency related companies. And, you know, I I'm involved in a lot of different cryptocurrency-related companies. And, you know, I see the type of meetings they have and who they're talking to.

And, you know, it's very interesting. I always hear later, oh, you had this kind of meeting talking about this. It becomes very obvious what those meetings are about when you think about it. Right. The idea that, oh, the government must be against this because it flies in the face of something that they can regulate that in fact they're completely behind it right so one part of the government is nervous because oh how are people going to pay taxes well it's against the law to not pay your taxes whether you make money through bitcoin or not so that's that's an issue

that that probably will be regulated at some point or certainly well but look there's another side of the government which is very much interested in avoiding all of the basic problems of paper money. And now, you know, so I could go on and on, like what are the problems with paper money? But in a nutshell, that's several reasons why we're heading in this direction. And I didn't mention any blockchain. I didn't talk about cryptography. I know you didn't even use any of the phraseology.

And I didn't hear the word fork once. No, no forking. And by the way, I've read the code of Bitcoin. I'm a technologist. Yeah, I'm sure that you could speak on all of this at length, right? But I appreciate the fact that like, in order for us to,

the average person to understand it, we need to find a new vernacular around it. But the essence of like how I sort of understand it and see it, and please tell me if and when I'm wrong, I probably will be wrong, is that first of all, there's a distinction between investment, like an investment perspective and a perspective of using this as a currency. And now everyone with this crazy spike is looking at Bitcoin as an investment, not as a fungible currency that you're going to be using to exchange all the time. Everyone wants to get in and sit on this thing and see how high it's going to go.

Yeah, I think the speculation hype is too big, but there's three things I can say about that, again, without mentioning technology. So Coinbase is the largest place where people buy a bit. You could sign up for Coinbase in a day and buy yourself a Bitcoin. They're getting like 100,000 new signups a day. Yeah, there's 100,000 new signups a day, exactly. And every one of them are buying some Bitcoin. So they sign up and they're like, oh, this is fun. And they're going to buy a Bitcoin.

So there's more demand than supply. The supply is fixed on Bitcoin. There can't be new Bitcoins made. And there's a nuance to that, but we don't have to get into it. And there's also 16 millionaires on the planet. So they're all looking at this spike, every one of the 16 million. And currently in circulation, there happens to be about 16 million Bitcoins out there, maybe even a little bit less right now. And a large chunk of those coins are already owned.

So if every single millionaire says to themselves, oh, I'm just going to buy one Bitcoin and put it away and never look at it, that's more than the entire supply that exists. That's why the price keeps going up because every millionaire is saying that some of them are trying to buy more than the entire supply that exists. That's why the price keeps going up because every millionaire is saying that some of them are buying more than trying to buy more than one Bitcoin. So the price goes up even more. That's why we had this kind of parabolic move all of a sudden. And so where do you think this is going to go? Like how does this play out in the short and long run? Well, in the short run, I think you're going to, there's a lot of, we've been talking about Bitcoin, but there

are maybe like 900 cryptocurrencies out there and probably 890 of them are scams or useless. So they're all going to go to zero and that's going to scare people a little bit. So that'll bring Bitcoin down and reduce demand for Bitcoin. So at some point there'll be a lot of volatility and fluctuations. But the first thing I described, which was kind of how the history of money and how every industry is evolving and the need for a database currency, that is not going away. There's already $200 billion worth of cryptocurrencies. That should tell anybody this is not a fad. $200 billion, that's more than the internet was worth back in 1999. It's $200 billion real money being put here. But if cryptocurrencies are really going to replace

paper currencies, if they really solve the problems of paper currencies, you have to say, well, what's the demand for paper currencies? There's $200 trillion worth of paper currencies, only $200 billion of cryptocurrencies. The demand and supply are pretty much fixed. There's not going to be more demand for paper money, really. And there's not going to be more supply of that much more supply of cryptocurrencies. So the only thing that has to change in the equation is price. So eventually the price will move up on the 200 billion to match the demand for the 200 trillion.

So I do think we're in inning one or zero of a very long term investment process. But the current speculation, who knows? I think anybody should just buy and not look at the price. On a daily basis, I don't know what the price is of Bitcoin. I don't look at it. I don't know what the price is of anything because I'm playing the long game. And if you get stressed about short-term trading, it's too stressful. I'm too old for that. I used to be a day trader. So I know the stress of looking at price every day is too much for me. Right. So when somebody comes up to you, as I'm sure every single day they do, and say, James, what should I do with this? Is your advice like, well, if you have some disposable income,

buy whatever Bitcoin you can afford to lose, and then just set it and forget it. Yeah, basically be willing to afford to see a 50 or 60 percent downturn. But play the long game. Bitcoin's probably going to be one of the winners in the cryptocurrency space. It's currently the winner, but it's probably going to be one of several. In terms of other, you know, if somebody asked me, should I wait for the dip? I said, you could wait for that, but that's not what I do. So psychologically, it's very hard to wait for a dip if something, you know, I've seen people waiting for the dip since it was $2,000 and now it's $11,000. So they never got that dip and, you know, they missed out on that move. Then the next move is still happening.

But if someone asks me about specific cryptocurrencies, I think if that's their first foray into this, they should learn a lot more because I think there's lots of reasons for different cryptocurrencies, but you have to really study it. And I have things, that's where I start to sell packages and I have researchers that, that look into this stuff. But if somebody just wants exposure, Bitcoin and Ethereum are pretty

good. Right. Cause if you get a bit, if you get a Coinbase account, you have Bitcoin, you have Ethereum, and then you have what, Litecoin? So I just presume that those are the other two that, that seem the most stable. Yeah. I mean, even there, though, there's still a lot of volatility, and there's coins that are out there to help reduce the volatility. There's lots of coins that are used to solve problems. So why is there a Canadian dollar and a U.S. dollar? It's because we have an artificial border that separates Canada from the U.S. Canada from the US. But there's a reason why there's Bitcoin and Litecoin is there's Litecoin solves a problem that Bitcoin doesn't solve. So different cryptocurrencies solve different problems. So there are like what I call problem borders. And if you're looking at

other cryptocurrencies, you kind of have to do the research. Is this problem a big problem? Is this coin solve that problem? Like traceability, for example, would be one of those problems, right? Like, isn't one of them like less traceable than Bitcoin or something like that? Yes, so anonymity. So if I send you, if you and I do a transaction,

nobody could see our names, but they could see the size of the transaction and the time. Now that's anonymous for most, but it's not anonymous for others. Like maybe it might not be anonymous for a government, a big government transaction. So there are other cryptocurrencies that are great for that, that are more anonymous than Bitcoin, even though Bitcoin is very anonymous. So it's this crazy, like these crazy customized currencies that are very specific to like niche needs. Yeah. And some not so niche. Think about the

combination of Dropbox and Google Drive. That's like a $20 billion online storage market. And then throw AWS in there, it might be a $40 billion online storage market. What if there's a coin that was not centralized with one company, but decentralized? Now you have decentralized storage. So the government can't find the things you're storing, as opposed to Google, which has a regular relationship with the government, revealing accounts and so on. So maybe, who knows. And that could be a potential coin developed to solve a $40 billion problem.

So that's like an example of a problem that may or may not need solving. Right. Is there a specific place, like other than like following your stuff and subscribing to your emails, like where you can direct people who just want to get the basic sort of lay down on like how this all works? Yeah. I mean, I think there's one book that I haven't read it, but I heard it's pretty good called Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas something or other. Oh, Antonopoulos, that guy. Yeah, yeah, that guy. I've tried to listen to a couple of interviews with him, but he quickly goes too far off the reservation for me.

I think like- I'm fairly internet savvy and I'm like, not only does it get too technical, like I'm not interested in that part of it. I think a lot of those guys are trying to impress each other with their technology understanding of this when it really should be all couched in terms of how are we going to really use this? I don't care about the 100,000 lines of code. Another blog that I like is Nick Szabo, S-C-A-B-O, and he was also on Tim Ferriss' podcast. He's very smart. Here's what I want. Here's what I want. Like, here's what I'm looking for.

I just want, like, I want a guy like you who, like, knows it all and is, like, super into it that I can just go to and go, here's the money that I can afford right now. Like, you just,

you take this and you, like a brokerage. Like, you just do what you think is best. So I got that, I got that offer, like, a group of bankers. One guy was the CFO

of a major, like, top five investment bank. One guy was the CFO of a major like top five investment bank. Another guy was a big hedge fund investor. And they basically said, here's a hundred million. Can you invest this in cryptocurrencies? And I, you know, you reach a point in life, which, you know, I know you've reached where you're like, you just don't want to do what you don't want to do. It doesn't matter the money involved. And I just did not want to do what you don't want to do. It doesn't matter the money involved. And I just did not want to do it. So instead of doing that, I wrote about it instead. So people could, you don't have to be the three people with, you know, a hundred million

dollars and they're just going to get wealthier and they're already wealthy. You can be anybody and start to understand what's happening. I think it's very interesting philosophically. So I was happy to just write about this on a larger scale. But I think if you, I honestly don't know which link of mine leads to what, but I did a six video class with four people we just took off the street. And I taught them the basics up to opening an account and buying a Bitcoin. And then I wrote a book, which I think I give out for free somewhere called Cryptocurrencies 101 but I don't have it on Amazon

I just wanted to give it to people who subscribe to something but I honestly don't know where I give away these things this is what I want to get into next is like you're creating so much content like I said

like I get multiple emails from you like every single day. You're putting up three podcasts a week. Like I don't know how that's humanly possible. Well, now I'm gathering a little bit being in the studio and meeting your producer, et cetera. You're writing every single day. You've really, you know, grown this enterprise into quite something. And you've traveled a lot of roads since we last spoke. A lot of changes in your personal life.

You're inching towards 50. Are you still doing the, like, I stay in different Airbnbs all the time? So right after we last saw each other, So right after we last saw each other, I made this big move where I was renting two different places at the same time, the place you were in and a place upstate near my kids. And the place upstate near my kids was a full house with, let's call it, 40 years worth of belongings that I've been carrying around forever. And so I said to a friend of mine, I'm going to go away for a week. I want you to go to both these places. And, you know, you can either throw everything away, give everything away, keep anything for yourself or sell anything and keep the money for yourself.

And I thought it would take her a day because nobody realizes actually how much stuff they have. Like you can't even believe the amount of stuff that you own physically. And it took her a week with a big truck, with all her family helping her. And she did it. I had no belongings left. I had gone to California with a carry-on bag.

And when I came back from California, all I owned was what was in that carry-on bag. Did you go through all your stuff beforehand to weed out? No, zero. Or you were just like, I'm walking away completely? Yeah. So photo albums of my kids, photo albums of my parents. I had a huge comic book collection. I had a huge comic book collection I had artwork

I had whoever was the original animator just as an example because there's a lot more mundane examples but whoever was the original animator of Snow White I had the original sketches of all the dwarfs so I had stuff like that but then also you don't realize how many dishes you have, how many sheets you have, how many towels and jackets and underwear and so much and, you know, books. And then the only time she said, don't call me at all during the week. The only time she called me was and this tags back to our original discussion.

was, and this tags back to our original discussion. She said, your diploma is so nicely framed. You worked hard for that. Are you sure you want me to throw this out? And I said, yeah, no one. I have never once used that diploma for anything. You could just burn that. And she got rid of everything.

And I had nothing left at all. And I had maybe two outfits in my carry-on bag and a computer, like a laptop and a phone. And that was it. That was all I had. And I had toothpaste and toothbrush. And that's all I had for a while. And then I decided, okay, I'm not going to rent another place because- All right, but hold on. I'm going to do what you do and interrupt you for a second,

because I don't want to breeze past this too quickly. Certainly something had to be going on with you emotionally to lead you to make what many would probably contend is like a rash decision. Maybe you haven't thought about this, James. What was going on with you at that time that led you to act in that way? All right, so I'm going to answer this in a way that I haven't really answered before because a lot of people have asked me this. And first of all, I'll couch this with a lot of people said, oh, it must have felt so freeing and you must have felt so happy with this. And the answer is no, not really.

and you must have felt so happy with this. And the answer is no, not really. But being a minimalist has some benefits, but there's also some downsides to minimalism. And I don't really consider myself an ism-ist. Like I didn't really consider this a minimalist thing. I consider this a convenience thing. thing. I consider this a convenience thing. So I was going through something very kind of traumatic in my life. And I know that sounds leading, like I should say what it was, but out of fairness to other people, I would rather not say what it was, but it was traumatic to me. And I didn't really know how to live a normal life. So I've always lived,

when I first moved to the city, I moved in with a roommate. And then when I had some money, I moved into the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street. So I never had my own place. And then eventually, I got married. I still didn't move out of the Chelsea Hotel until about three months later. I finally moved in with my wife. You were married for three months. You're still living in the Chelsea Hotel. Yeah. Maybe just paint a picture of the Chelsea Hotel for people that aren't familiar with what that means.

So it's a beautiful, beautiful building. Now, for the first time in 130 years, they kind of tore apart the insides and they're making condos. They've ruined it, essentially. It's kind of a shame the insides and they're making condos. They've ruined it essentially. It's kind of a shame. Yeah, it's a shame because, I mean, every artist ever and writer that you could think musician has lived there at some point. Patti Smith. Yeah, Patti Smith. Robert Maperthorpe.

Yeah. Dylan Thomas. Did Lou Reed live there? I believe he did, yeah. Janis Joplin. I think Andy Warhol had, not him but people working with him I mean the movie I shot Andy Warhol a lot of it takes place in the hotel when I was living there in 90s Ethan Hawke lived there and a lot of Madonna wrote the book sex there and I

don't know a lot of people a lot a lot of people live there and there was also it was the one place where just every room something strange was happening on the other side of the door and but it's also kind of a dump too right oh it's awful like one time my kids were visiting me this is so after I got married and then divorced for my first wife. I had two children. I moved back into the Chelsea Hotel. And my two daughters were visiting me. And I had to make sure.

Like, they didn't see one time we were walking down. There was, like, a condom on the staircase, like a used condom. And I had to tell the people downstairs all this. Because there was also a lot of prostitutes and drug dealers living there. But there was art on every wall. Like artists would pay their rent in art. And it's just all these crazy stories there. But consequently, I had never, you know, and then I got remarried and moved in with my wife then. And got divorced again.

And I don't know. I had never lived in my own apartment ever in my life and so I had no idea really how to function with belongings on my own and so part of it was these are just the trappings of being married you accumulate all of this stuff because it's sort of like that's just what you're supposed to do yeah and it's finally like when I got married the first time finally my parents were like okay here take all of this it because it's sort of like that's just what you're supposed to do. Yeah. And it's finally like when I got married the first time, finally, my parents were like, okay, here, take all of this. It's like all your stuff from whenever. Childhood, right? Yeah. And then you just build up stuff. You buy more and more things and you never throw things away and you keep paperwork and you store it. And so I had all of these, literally it was, I think seven or eight days worth of truckloads back and

forth worth of items. And so then I had, I didn't want to rent these places anymore, but I didn't know how to rent a place on my own. I didn't know what to do with all my belongings. I didn't want to just store them for what purpose, for no purpose. So I decided to get rid of everything, just to make my life easier. And then I didn't want to rent either. In New York City, it's very hard to rent a place. for what purpose, for no purpose. So I decided to get rid of everything, just to make my life easier. And then I didn't want to rent either.

In New York City, it's very hard to rent a place. I needed, last time I rented, I needed six, even when I was renting with someone I was married to, I needed six recommendation letters. I needed a letter from my lawyer, a letter from my accountant. I've never had a credit card in my life. I've always used debit cards.

So my credit score was weird. So landlords would want to know what is up here. You never have this weird credit score because I've never had any debt at all. That's amazing. As somebody who comes from finance that you never had a credit card. Yeah. So the minimalist sort of spirit was living within you card. Yeah. Well, I, I, so the, the minimalist sort of, uh, spirit was living within you earlier. Probably. Well, I think part of it though, is a certain dysfunctionality on my part.

I think there's some part of me where I can't, I'm not very, I mean, a lot of people are not very good at paperwork, but they do it anyway. And I just wouldn't, I can't, I can't do it at all. It's almost like I'm dyslexic with paperwork. And so I figured, it was very hard to rent a place on my own. So I figured, okay, I'm not going to do it because I can't get approved. I have no credit score. I need all these, and I don't have a job, right? So I have multiple businesses.

And I haven't had a job in 20 years. Like no one knows what to make of you. Right. They're never going to rent you an apartment. Right. Because I don't, there's not like one thing I do either. I can't say, oh, I'm a writer. Here's my checks from Amazon.

There's no one thing I do. And so I said, okay, I'm just going to keep this carry-on bag. And if I do Airbnbs, I never have to buy furniture or anything and so I would just Airbnb from place to place so I Airbnb'd all over I don't know all over the country but really mostly all over people said oh did you travel all over the world no I just like living in New York just like moving around New York with one bag and then that famous article got written about this experience for the New York Times. Like this huge profile is like this incredible photo of you like getting out of a cab with like your duffel bag, the only thing you own.

Yeah. And that must have caused like, that must have impacted your life to have that story written, you know, in that way. It was unbelievable. Like, I don't know, famous movie producers were calling like around the clock. They wanted to do like a TV series around what was happening to me. Then a reality producers, like well-known reality producers were calling and wanted to do a reality series around it. You didn't want to do any of that stuff? Did anything happen with any of that or you didn't want to do any of that? You know, I think things are kind of still in progress. I'm still kind of deciding. But

I think the main thing is, is that this is why I like doing rather than I think you can't write until you do. So now I was able to write about this experience as opposed to writing about minimalism when I had six truckloads worth of stuff. How can you write about minimalism? I was writing instead of writing about an ism. I was just writing about what happened, what was happening to me and what was going on in my head. And then people could decide for themselves, is this an interesting life? It's more like just I'm not giving any advice.

I'm just telling my story. And then people were following that. any advice. I'm just telling my story. And then people were following that. So it was a way to do an experiment in a certain way of living that most people don't live and to kind of document it along the way. So I did that for about a year and a half solidly where I had already been doing the Airbnb thing, but the minimalist part was about a year and a half. And it's only in the past month, I finally rented an apartment. Oh, you did? Yeah. And so I'm 49 years old. And it's the first time in my life, I've rented an apartment

completely on my own and furnished it completely on my own without a wife or a girlfriend. That's amazing. So what was the biggest thing? What was the age you were when you first rented an apartment and furnished it? When I furnished it? By yourself. Like, never. I don't think I ever did that. Well, I spent my 20s just partying and, like, broke and blowing all my money.

But were you living, like, in an apartment? Yeah, but most of the time I was in an apartment that had almost no furniture in it with, like, a mattress on the floor. And that was, like, it, right? Yeah. So frankly, like it wasn't until I got married or just moved in with Julie and she already had a bunch of furniture that we started to kind of build around that. And to this day,

like I share all of your fear of paperwork. I mean, had that not happened, like I still very well could be like, you know, sleeping on the floor somewhere. So, so, so what happened to me was I wanted to, for very specific reason, I wanted to move into one particular area of Manhattan and there were no Airbnbs available, uh, for whatever reason. I don't know why I think Airbnb is cracking down a little bit on Manhattan. Uh, and also, uh, the Upper West side of, of New York, there were less people Airbnb-ing for whatever reason. And I talked to a friend of mine,

and she said, you know what? Stop the Airbnb thing already. And she's always given me good advice. And she said, listen, you're 49, you're going to be 50. People are going to, like, women you meet, the kind of woman you want to meet to spend the rest of your life with potentially, is probably going to, it's probably going

to think it's a little creepy what you're doing and that you're not putting down roots anywhere and you're not willing to take on this kind of, you know, a reasonable task for an adult to take on, which is to rent a place and to furnish it and just get a nice apartment and furnish it. So I followed her. Snap out of it already. You had your fun. Right.

Exactly. Which is sort of what she said. Snap out of it already. You had your fun. Right, exactly. Which is sort of what she said. And she's been on my podcast, actually. Made some movies, wrote some great novels.

But I did it. I just finished the process of furnishing my own place, probably in the past week. Well, congratulations. Thank you. And it's great. I have to say, I feel this enormous wave that I've never felt before of being stable

that I've felt in the past week. That's interesting because the experiment was really about can you be stable irrespective of externalities? Really, right? It's sort of an exploration of that.

Like what is your relationship to the material world? Yeah, and I guess I liked, I wanted to think I had no relationship to it, which was really true for a long period of time. I did have no actual relationship to it, but maybe now I go, I found a building that I loved, just like I loved the Chelsea Hotel.

And I found an apartment I liked within that building. And now I have my own stuff in there. And it's not much, it's not many things. It's still minimalist, but it's just the things I needed. And now when I get home, like this is my, I'm renting, but it feels like my place. And what is the biggest thing that you took away from that experience that year and a half? What did you learn? I did learn that I really didn't

need anything. Like there was nothing I actually needed, but I also learned too, that everyone kept saying, Oh, you must be really happy. It must be really freeing. And I'm like, no, there are things that I miss and things that I'm sad. I no longer have. And, and they're like, no, there are things that I miss and things that I'm sad I no longer have. And they're like, oh, have you tried doing this to cheer yourself up? Once people hear the word sad, they want to cheer you up. And I'm like, no, it's fine that I miss these things. I'm a human being and I miss not having these photos. I miss not having my, you know, Dr. McCoy doll on my next to my computer from the 70s. And I miss, you know, not having certain things from my childhood or from my kid's childhood or whatever. So there was certain melancholy that I became comfortable with and

realized that that's not has nothing to do with whether you have what happiness has nothing to do with well-being so you could still have well-being and occasionally feel sad and melancholy and miss things so and also appreciate the things i missed the the purge allows you to figure out which things have hold value for you right like when you when you're just sitting on a whole bunch of stuff it all seems the same yeah like you know what i really realize that's interesting a lot of people always say uh a lot of people ask do you like books better than you like reading a kindle and people have an opinion on it and they have opinion for reasons but i really have realized recently oh because i would only read on a kindle for a year and a half i would never buy a book because that would have to i'd have to replace my rule was i had if i bought something i had

to replace something in the bag and so there was no room for what was in the bag two two or three outfits tops computer and a phone and and the toothpaste and toothbrush i don't really count but that was in an air every airbnb had towels towels. So, but I couldn't buy any books because there was nothing to, no room for it. But now I'm buying books again, and it's, the reading experience is really different with a physical book than a Kindle. And I'm not saying one is better than the other,

it depends on the type of book, but for certain types of fiction books, I value the physical book reading experience much, much more. It's like 10 times better. It's interesting that you're focusing on books. It's not about some big ticket expensive thing that you miss, that you bought, that costs a lot of money. It's simple things. Yeah. I will never buy again some big big ticket item that I, I got over any need for that at all. So it's, uh, you know, I don't, there's, I can't even imagine what I would buy if I had an, like, if someone said, Oh, here's an extra X amount of dollars, you have to buy something with it. I can't imagine what I would buy with it right now. Right, right, right. It

does. It is enticing. Like there is a, uh, like a sense of, of like exhilarating freedom that I would imagine comes with that. But there's probably also the kind of day to day pressures. Like if your Airbnb is running out, then you got to figure out another one or you have nowhere to sleep that night. Like there's probably some other things that like people don't realize they get tossed aside in the conversation around it. Yeah. And you, usually you can avoid that, um, by planning in advance, but there were, there were a couple of times I had that situation where I, it was down to the wire. So, and I, and I no longer, yeah, but you could always go to a hotel, but I know that's your role. You can't do that. I didn't want to stay in a hotel. I wanted to stay in Airbnbs because in Airbnb,

you actually live in a real place. In a hotel, there's one bed and a bathroom. I felt like back to being a dorm room again. Even a nice hotel is still one room with a bed and then a bathroom.

I have two kids. They couldn't visit and then a bathroom. So I didn't, you know, and I have two kids. So if they were, they couldn't visit me in a hotel. I needed to have like multiple rooms and places where they felt comfortable visiting. And now being on the other side of that experience, like what do you think will be, you know, the thing that you take away from it long-term, like in terms of how it reframes your, you know,

relationship with consumerism? I think I'll never again buy items. So you've kind of famously said like, nobody should buy a house, right? Things like that. Yeah. I'll never buy a house. But one thing I do value is I love convenience. I will buy experience. So I'll buy experiences and I'll buy convenience. So, which is very different than buying items. So for instance, with Airbnbs, depending on where my podcast studio was that I was using the most, I would Airbnb as close as possible to that podcast studio. So I'd have the convenience of walking there instead of taking a cab there.

walking there instead of taking a cab there or I all the time will do something that will seem frivolous to others but because I'm not but I don't have a car I don't have two cars I don't have all these other things that people have I'm able to do things that will get me conveniently from one place to the other you know and it's convenient as a a manner as possible. So I'm trying to think of other examples. I don't know. I just think most people, they're willing to buy more things than I'm willing to buy. Like now I'm pretty much set on what I own. Well, we're in the grips of this mass delusion that, you know, the answer to, you know, our problems can be found in that next purchase, right? And when we don't find it, we think, well, when the new Tesla comes out or the

new MacBook or the new iPhone, then that will be the answer, right? And we persist in this delusion to our grave. And, you know, you get, like, I remember reading the biography of Elon Musk, and I was getting excited. Oh, my God, this Tesla sounds great, but I can't do it. It doesn't fit in the bag. So automatically, I just had a reason. And now I still have kind of the same philosophy of I have this bag, so I'm not going to buy an extra coat or an extra clothing item that I don't need. Or I don't drive, so I'm not gonna buy cars but I will I will pay for convenience so if I need to I don't know I don't know I don't even know what an example oh if I want to go see a

comedian that I love I'll buy the second row seats in the middle because when you have buy an experience an experience you're looking forward to it You have the experience you think about it afterwards like I still think about a year ago going to my favorite comedians stand-up special and I can't even remember any item I bought a year ago, right? Have you seen the minimalism documentary? I haven't no I heard it's good. Right. Have you seen the Minimalism documentary? I haven't, no. I heard it's good. Yeah, it's really well done. I've emailed back and forth with those guys.

But I also I think I rebelled a little against the word because I didn't really consider... You didn't want to get pigeonholed into that. Yeah, and also I considered myself more incompetent than minimalist. So that was kind of part of the reason I have to admit that for what I did was that I just was not really functional in that way.

I'm very highly functional in other ways, but not in that way. Yeah, that's really funny. Well, let's talk about the comedy thing. You've made this move into doing stand-up. How many nights a week? You're doing this a couple nights a week now, right? Yeah, I'm doing it like this week. I'll do it five nights.

And I'll do anywhere between like three and six nights. Like a slow week will be three weeks, three nights for me. So, I mean, this is nuts because, you know, look, you write on all these different subject matters. But I can't imagine there's too many, you know, stand-up comedians who have written like a crazy number of books like you have, who can also speak intelligently and eloquently about blockchain cryptocurrency like you're a man of many talents james so what motivated you i mean i know you're funny like i'm glad that you're doing stand-up i would love to see you do this but like what inspired you to like take this leap into this world well two things one is i mean i've always

loved comedy and like i would even in the, in the past six or seven years, I even wrote quite a bit about comedians and what I've learned from them. Clearly they've inspired a lot of what you do. Yeah, and I love it. And I would go, in the 90s, I would go to the Aspen Comedy Festival every year where all the best comedians in the world would gather and do their performances. And I would go to I would go out to comedy clubs like every night back then before I was

married but I was always afraid to do it I was scared to death to do stand-up and so one time I was doing a podcast and it was above a comedy club and the owner of the comedy club saw me doing the podcast is He's like, oh, this guy's funny. I'll ask him. So he asked me to do five minutes of comedy a week later. And so I did it, and I was scared to death. Did you write new material? Like you just spent the whole week writing five minutes?

Yeah, I spent the whole week writing five minutes because I had no material at all. And then he wrote me a week later. He's like, come back again, do it again. And so I started going back and more and more. I would do 10 minutes. I would do 15 minutes. I would start doing other clubs around the city. I got like obsessed with it because I wasn't good.

I was really, it was a different skill set than I had ever encountered before. It was like the hardest thing I had ever encountered. What's the difference between being funny in your writing and getting up on stage and being funny? So, first off, I could do public speaking and make people laugh the entire time. Right. Or almost the entire time. That did not translate to stand-up comedy at all. Stand-up comedy, on the other hand, translates a hundred,

like my public speaking has gone up tenfold in ability because of stand-up comedy. But public speaking, if I try to do what I do to make people laugh in public speaking, is not funny at all in stand-up comedy. It's no, you cannot bring it. Why is that? It's just a different skill set because humor is not even the most important skill of stand-up comedy.

I mean, if you want to laugh, there's plenty of YouTube videos of cats that are funnier than any stand-up comic. But like stand-up comedy, there's maybe 20 or 30 separate micro skills that all have to be mastered to be really good. So you have to master likability. You have to master understanding the crowd. There's so many different types of crowds that have to be kind of cataloged almost, and you do something different with each crowd. And now with public speaking, you think a little bit about the crowd, but not so much. If you're speaking at a health

conference, the crowd already knows you. It's a rich role. They're going to come to see you speak. They're in the audience because they want to see you speak. They already like you, and it's already the crowd you're comfortable with. So when I go on stage with stand-up, nobody knows who I am, so they don't like me yet. They have to figure out if they're going to like me. And I don't know, is there more women than men in the crowd? Is this crowd from New York? Is this crowd from the Midwest? Is this crowd mostly tourists? There's so many different, is this crowd old? Is it young? Is this crowd going to handle vulgarity or zero vulgarity? There's so many things you have to analyze microsecond by microsecond with that crowd. And at the same time, think about your likability, which is much more important than

the humor. You have to think about how you're moving around the stage, how you're holding the mic. And then the jokes themselves. Is it a persona? Is there a punchline? Are there reversals? Are you telling a story? Is there a misdirection? There's so many different Skills, how do you how could you talk to the crowd if you see somebody? For instance, here's a great example, which I didn't know at first, but now I know a little better What if a crowd is always laughing at the punchlines? But they're not laughing at the mini punchlines that happen in between In the middle of a joke A joke is usually several punchlines

and then a main punchline. What's going on? The last crowd laughed at every little mini punchline. This crowd's only laughed, they like me, but they're only laughing at the main punchline. Well, it might be late at night and they're drunk and they're tired, but they like you. So they're laughing at the main punchline,

but they're too tired to laugh throughout. So what do you do? There's techniques for what you do in that situation which will never occur in public speaking that you would never do it in a talk like what let's say the crowds got a hundred people in it or 50 50 or 100 people you'll point directly to someone who's who's in the crowd who's already laughing and you'll make a statement about them so maybe you'll begin the next joke instead of, and you'll make a statement about them. So maybe you'll begin the next joke. Instead of saying it, you'll make a statement about a person.

Like, you know you're about to commit suicide, right? And then they start laughing because they already were laughing. But now the rest of the crowd has suddenly just perked up because they don't want to be called on. So they're now going to focus for the remaining six or seven minutes and they're going to pay much more attention because they really do not want you to call on them and talk to them or ask them a question. And so it's because it's scary to speak at all in front of a crowd for most people.

So they're going to be on alert and they're going to be nicer and they're going to laugh at everything after that. So that's how you juice up the energy of a smallish tired crowd. But that's one 100th of what you have to learn about crowds. Yeah. And so are you learning this? I mean, obviously through experience and repetition, but do you, or do you have, do you have like mentors? You have comedians that are like trying

to teach you this stuff? Yeah. So the most important thing is repetition because you have mentors? Do you have comedians that are trying to teach you this stuff? Yeah, so the most important thing is repetition because you have to gain the experience because you have to know what the problem is. I would never have known that was a problem until I experienced it over and over. Like, why are some crowds doing this and some crowds not doing this,

but they still seem to like me? And then sometimes, why do some crowds not like me and some crowds do? What's different? But then also, very do some crowds not like me and some crowds do? What's different? But then also very important, I think to kind of hack the 10,000 hours, you can hack maybe a good four or 5,000 of it by just building a community of really good comedians.

Like I always make sure I go up on a lineup of professionals and not like open mics, because you wanna be able to build friendships with professional comedians. And this is what a podcast is great for too i can get any comedian on my podcast and ask and i'll just ask them all the problems i've been having on my own sets and i think back to the comedians i had on before i was doing comedy to now so completely my questions are completely different because i really did not understand at all what they were doing. Well, you have context now.

Yeah. And there's so much context. I've only been doing it like a year now. It's so hard. I don't know how long I have to. I feel like I've hacked some of the 10,000 hours, but there's still so much to learn. But now the questions I ask are very direct, very determined. They're different than, you know,

how did you get over these obstacles and all that kind of thing. It's like, what do you do in this situation when the heckler says this? What if the heckler is a drunk woman? Or what if the MC does this? Or what if the mic goes out in the middle of your set? Or all these things. What if the check is being passed around while it's your set?

It's called the check spot. What if you're doing the check spot? And how do you deal with it? Because people are talking. And then how did you really do that joke? Because now I see there's nuances to how they do these jokes and call back to other jokes. It's an art form.

I've heard many a podcast with many a comedian and and a consistent thing that you'll hear is even the most experienced the most successful who are really dedicated stand-ups will say like they don't like to take you know a week or two off they start to feel rusty like they want to be going up like all the time all the time all the time and they're always learning it's the same thing as writing you really can't take a week off from writing or else you'll have to write a few days in a row to get back the muscle. Well, with comedy, I haven't taken a week off

since I've started, but even taking a few days off, you get rusty. There's lots of ways you get rusty. If you have, one thing to be wary of, which is not the same case with public speaking, if you have a really good set, like they're laughing the entire time, that's dangerous also

because the next time you're up you want to replay that one and you can't you have to be in the moment you have to play your set for this totally new experience and so anyway I'm still at an infant stage in it

but I'm trying to hack it as much as possible I watch a lot of comedy I talk to a lot of professionals at the highest level I watch a lot of comedy. I talk to a lot of professionals at the highest level. I ask a million questions. I'm working on my material all the time. So, and part of it is

learning how to learn, like breaking down, like some of these comedians talk to me and I'm so analytical about their own sets. They're like, whoa, I never even thought of my own set that way because I'm really trying to analyze it. I'm trying to understand the meta language of learning that's an incredibly difficult skill.

So it's similar to like when I was learning how to play chess very well. But I would say this is harder than chess because it has to do with real people too. So you have to, chess maybe has 20 micro skills you have to learn. And this has maybe 50 to 100 i think it's i think it's cool and and and courageous to like step out into a world that is so foreign and so scary you know at 49 years old and try something totally new and you know as a writer as a curious mind like obviously you know this is i'm sure giving you tons of stuff to write about. But I feel like, you know, if there is a theme to your work, it is this willingness, this, this commitment to your own vulnerability and to sharing that vulnerability. And I think

stand up is like the ultimate in being vulnerable, you know, getting up on stage and exposing yourself on that level and and so it I guess it seems natural that this would be the evolution of what you're doing but yeah and I think also again like I look back to I used to write about comedians or comedy and now I really see the difference between writing and doing now if I write about it it's as much different flavor and texture than before when I wrote about it and I'm too new at it I write about it, it's a much different flavor and texture than before when I wrote about it. And I'm too new at it to write about it with any kind of expertise at all.

But I'm able to write about my failures in it, which is much the same way I used to write about my failure at money. You know, my times I've gone broke and stuff. You can't keep writing about going broke 3,000 articles in a row. It was the worst day of my life. You get A lot of emails that start like that. I know. So I had, I have to, I had to find new categories, like throwing all my things out and trying that and now stand up. So the whole reason I, I, one of the reasons I rent an apartment is one area is I decided I'm going to use my business expertise in standup. So after I'd been doing it for about six months, I bought part of the stand-up club that I performed the most at.

And so then for convenience, I rented. Now they have to let you go up. Well, no, I always tell them, if I'm bad, do not let me up. And I'm pretty sure they listen to me. Because there are some times I've asked, can I go up on this night? And they're like, no, no, this is like, you know, these people are going up.

You don't quite fit that line. But maybe less likely to get bumped when like Chris Rock shows up. Oh, if Chris Rock shows up, I'm bumping myself. So, but I have performed next to some really great comedians and that's always a great experience, because going up after T.J. Miller, it's like, oh my God, how do I go up after him?

Or going up after Judah Friedlander, who was on 30 Rock, he has such an insane style, how do I go up after him? And that's part of the challenge. It's never fun before going up, because it's scary as hell. And one time, I wanted to tighten up. I felt like I was

using too many words to get to the laugh. So one time I did, I went on a subway, and every stop I switched cars and started doing stand-up on the subway. Oh, I think you wrote about this. Yeah, I wrote about that. So I'm willing to write about it. It's so terrifying. I could never do that.

Hearing the fact that you did it makes me get uncomfortable. I got on the subway and someone was there to videotape it with a camera from the, like, so it wouldn't be so obvious. And I said, we just wasted our time. Let's just leave. And then I was thinking, you know, just put on the camera. Let's just see what I do. And then I, like 10 seconds later, I started doing it and it was, and then I switched cars each stop. Uh, like you tried something a little bit different each time. Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn't good. Like I, I had nothing really prepared and, uh, I just wanted to see if I could do it and I was able to do it and it was scary. But you're always flexing your muscles, uh, and putting yourself in these uncomfortable, you know, situations to just get over that fear, right?

Like, I feel like that you're in the habit of that, which is a really positive, good habit to be in. But it's really what I've found is that the skills, even if I never did stand up again from this moment on, the skills just in this past year, I've seen it now in public speaking, I've seen myself use it in writing, I've seen myself use it on television. It translates to so many, I've seen myself use it in meetings. It translates to so many other things that I didn't expect it to translate to.

This is the part where I say, like, maybe I should try that, but I'm so not funny that that would just be a disaster. It might, you know, first off, you're an extremely likable person, right? You know, you're, you, you have likability, which is an important skill. I can get laughs when I do the public speaking, but it's exactly what you said. It's like, you know, these people, there's a context for it. They know me, they want to see me. It's a different thing. Well, when you try telling a joke like at home like a classic joke

do people laugh? not my daughters they just roll their eyes and tell me to leave okay so that's you gotta get that ability up no I know I know

I know well maybe I'll work on it you should it's an interesting experience the concept just because it's so scary the concept of controlling not controlling is the wrong word, but understanding a crowd, that concept by itself. Like Dave Chappelle, very funny guy, but not everything he does is funny.

Sometimes it's just interesting what he says. And then now you notice he'll signal to the crowd they need to laugh. Like he'll start laughing and he'll hit his knee with the mic, and he'll bend over laughing. And then suddenly the crowd's like, oh, that was interesting. I'm going to laugh at that. He teaches the crowd how to laugh at his material until he has a funny joke, and then they laugh naturally.

But it's just interesting to see. Like, sometimes humor is not the most – saying interesting things is more important. Right, right, right. And being a good storyteller. Storytelling is really hard in comedy. Yeah? Yeah, it's really hard. That's more the purview of the alt-comedy world.

Yeah, which ultimately you need to be funny. And storytelling is often not funny until the end. And you don't have enough time. Traditional stand-up, you have to get people to laugh much more than traditional storytelling. So where are you taking all this? Like what are you working towards here? Like what's next? Like what does James Altucher look like next year at this time?

I don't know, but I kind of – I really do take it one at a time. I'm really trying to be good at this incredibly difficult skill because I do think it translates to everything else I'm doing. It's improving my ability to learn anything else. But then putting my business hat on, I was able to buy this club, which, by the way, is not a good investment. I would not recommend that type of investment to anybody. But then I thought to myself, well, I have a stage and a lineup of comedians and an audience and a bar every night. And so what I've started doing is I shot my first half hour special. So I came up with an idea that's different from anything that you would

see on Netflix, but it involves comedians and it involves being on a stage. And I just finished shooting it and it's almost done being edited. And then I'm gonna, I'm creating a library of content because now I have all these resources. Oh, wow. That's amazing. So that would be,

you probably don't want to say what it is specifically. Yeah. But like some kind of, is it like an interview thing? No, no. What I did was, you always see,

you turn on Netflix, you see a comedian. It's just like an hour of them or a half hour of them. Standard specials. Yeah, just doing jokes. So what I did was, I did a night in the life of an emcee. So an emcee has to start off with her 15 minutes, and then she has to manage the energy of the crowd for two hours while eight different comedians go up. And she has to do crowd work the entire time,

like, where are you from? And then she has to make jokes on that and get the crowd energized between each comedian. So it's very difficult. And so we do a night in this one great emcee's life. And so it's all her comedy. And then we had segments from each comedian that went up, including some world-famous comedians.

And then she interviews the comedians in between sets, and we pull snippets from four or five of those, including, again, some world-famous comedians. And it's just, it's a great special in that it's funny from a lot of different people, but it's also this kind of inside comedy, like how this person struggled to become on this TV show and then get these stand-up specials

and then still doing his 10 or 15 minutes in this club. And so that's the first special we shot. Right, through a unique point of view. Yeah, and then the next one we're doing is comics that specializes in insulting the audience and then we're gonna fill the whole audience with Navy SEALs. So it's gonna be comics versus SEALs.

That's a pretty good idea. Yeah. So just all these things that I've never even thought of before, I get to do. That's cool. And why are you not doing

like live podcasts in the club? Oh, I'm going to start doing that too. You should definitely be doing that, right? So my podcast producer, we just visited the club

because we have studios upstairs. We just visited the club last week. We're going to do the whole thing. That's awesome. So yeah, we're doing events there where people interview me on the stage and then it leads into the comedy show. Fantastic, man. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, we got to wrap this up. So,

good talking to you, man. Yeah, Rich, once again, thanks so much. Yeah. Great to talk to you. Let's do it again sometime soon. Yeah. Oh, and next time you're in New York, come up to the club. I definitely will. I had no idea that all of this was going on. So I come here regularly. I will definitely let you know next time I'm here because I would love to see that. That would be really cool.

Yeah, it'd be fun. Awesome. So jamesaltucher.com. Choose yourself among your 250 books that you've written. Yeah. What else?

Where else? At James Altucher everywhere on the internet. Yeah, yeah. Easy to find, right? Or if you Google, I want to die on Google, I'm either the second or third result.

You could put that on your gravestone. Easy way to find me. Yeah, all right. And if somebody wants to come and see you do stand-up, is there a, like, how do they do that? Well, it's at Stand Up New York,

which is on 78th and Broadway. I go all over town. Actually, next next week I'm going to Chicago the laugh factory I'm doing 20 minutes there but stand up New York is where I usually do like three times a week at least and that's on 78th and Broadway and you can you I'm usually not on the schedule I don't want to be for various reasons but if you call them up they'll tell you if I'm going up that night all right awesome man can't wait to see it. Yeah. I look forward to it. All right, man. Great talking to you.

All right, we did it. It's over. It's done. How do you feel about it? What do you think? Do me a favor. Let James know how you felt about the conversation by hitting him up on Twitter at J Altucher and be sure to check out the show notes at richroll.com for plenty of additional links and resources to expand your experience of this conversation beyond the earbuds. Once again, Planned Power Away Italia is now available for pre-order. So reserve your copy today. And if you would like to support my work, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you enjoy this content. It only takes a second on your part, but it really does help out with the show's visibility and extending reach

and growing the audience, which in turn allows me to make the show better and get the best guests and all that kind of good stuff. You can also support the show on Patreon by going to richroll.com forward slash donate. If you need help with your diet and nutrition, I suggest checking out our meal planner. Thousands of custom tailored plant based recipes, grocery lists, even grocery delivery in almost every U.S. metropolitan area right at your fingertips. It's this incredibly potent, powerful toolbox that has everything you need to eat the way that you deserve. And it's just a dollar ninety a week when you sign up for a year.

So to learn more, go to meals.richroll.com or simply click on meal planner on the top menu at richroll.com. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, interstitial music, help with the show notes

and the WordPress page. Sean Patterson for help on graphics and theme music as always by Annalema. Thanks for the love, you guys. I appreciate it. See you back here soon. Until then, make it great. Do well.

Serve others. Be kind to yourself. Peace, plants. Namaste. Thank you.