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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with my friend James Altucher.
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He s a serial entrepreneur and author of several books, including Choose Yourself, and I ve been on his show, he s been on mine, and as you guys know, if you re a fan of James, he s an interesting, quirky guy, and I ask him a lot of questions that make up those quirks, and I ask him some stuff that maybe
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for a pretty open guy, some things that he might not normally think to divulge, not that he d keep them a secret.
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And this was interesting, the way that I prepped for this show is instead of reading a bunch of stuff and taking a bunch of notes from stuff on the internet, I just asked our mutual friends a bunch of questions that they had about him and then fired away here.
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So enjoy this one with James Altucher.
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And with that, welcome to the Art of Charm.
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We bring together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, in your relationships, and at work.
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If you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss things like body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, mentorship, and everything else we teach here at AOC in the US, just text charmed.
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to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the right questions.
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All right, here s James Altucher.
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I ve noticed one thing that you do a lot of, and I think you re kind of known for this, is you share stories of failure pretty much all the time.
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You think too much?
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I don t think too much.
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I just think that it s obviously really important to you.
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I actually think it s probably not too much at all because most of what people see out there, and I m gonna make fun of Gary Vee a little bit because I met with him yesterday,
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It s all like, you gotta do this, you gotta do that, I succeeded because of this.
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But very rarely do you hear someone go, let me tell you how I frickin  lost like 10 million dollars and cried myself to sleep and like became an alcoholic and was really depressed for like three years.
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And the problem is, the reality is that s what happens to most people.
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Yeah.
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So I m not trying to write like personal improvement.
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I actually really wanna be a writer and artistic about it and I think
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to connect with people, you want to write about an experience you have that they also might have had, and I think most people experience that, and then maybe they succeed, maybe they don t.
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I m just writing about my experience and what I ve done to kind of come through it.
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I m not really interested in the personal improvement industry.
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I m not interested in slogans like telling people to go hustle or hustle and grind.
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think positive all the time, A, most of that stuff doesn t really work.
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You can t really say, someone who s not hustling, and you tell them, oh, go hustle, they re not gonna go just start hustling.
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So like most advice doesn t work.
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Even if you re talking to your best friend, and he s going out with someone, or she s going out with someone who s cheating on them, and they say, or abusing them in some way, and you say, you know, you probably shouldn t go out with that person.
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even your closest friend s not gonna follow your advice.
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So why should random readers follow any advice?
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They just don t.
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So I always view advice as autobiography.
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So I tell my autobiography and then people can decide what they wanna do with it.
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And I don t say my autobiography is important, I just say I m probably experiencing something related to what you ve experienced, I hope, because it s been pretty much a disaster for me, so maybe it s been a disaster for some other people so I don t have to feel so bad all the time about it.
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It s funny, it ends up being about you in a non-self-centered way.
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It s funny you should say your closest friend s not gonna listen to your advice because you see memes which are a picture of a slogan on a picture of a guy with his arms in the air in front of a beach, right?
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It s like, hustle and grind so you can be on top or whatever.
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That s not a real one, but it s not too far off.
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And you re right, a stranger s not gonna listen to that, but you realize the people who post that stuff
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they don t expect other people to actually follow that advice either.
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It just makes you feel good about like, well, what are you doing to improve your business?
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Well, I follow these guys on Instagram, and every morning I wake up and I look at this poster that s inspirational, and then I talk a lot about grinding and resistance and people trying to bring me down, and so that makes me feel like I m fighting against all that, and then I go to the coworking space and sit on Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat,
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That s so true because I think real success, I don t know how you define it.
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Let s define it the way most people do initially.
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Everybody denies that they define it this way, but the reality is 99% of people define it by how much money you make.
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It s so nuanced how you make money and how you ve made money and how I make money, no one could probably even guess the real sources of how most people who make a lot of money made their money.
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And it s so nuanced in terms of it s very psychological.
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A lot of the times when I m dealing with business, most of the time I m talking with my partners, not about very specific hustling strategies, but I m talking about the psychology of the people we re dealing with and how we negotiate with them, how we win them over, how do we work with them, who should we work with, who do we like that we wanna work with.
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So it s very psychological.
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It s also about how do you get over the constant
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obstacles that are in the way.
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You need your landlord to agree to this, you need the head of sales, secretary at this one company to agree to this.
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You know, there s all these obstacles every day that you kind of have to react to.
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People say, oh, don t be reactive, be proactive.
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That s true also, but again, the world of slogans is like 5% or 1% of how business works, and then there s real business.
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And nobody gets that until you re in a real business.
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You have to get a customer.
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Most businesses don t live on venture capital welfare.
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They actually get customers, and that s really hard to sell, to make somebody part with their hard-earned after-tax money to buy something you ve made that they didn t realize they needed, that s really hard to do.
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It is, yeah.
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And it has nothing to do with anything on Instagram or Facebook, so I would never even dream to teach that, but I enjoy writing and I enjoy also maybe kind of, I d say, deflating a little bit the sort of motivational,
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slogans and posters and everything because I feel it s almost inhibiting people from finding happiness and success.
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And so now I ll broaden the definition of success a little bit by like, okay, it s also good to not make the most amount of money on the block, to not have the biggest place on the block.
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Like you and I were talking about before this podcast, we were looking, you know, out the window is the late David Bowie s old apartment.
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And it s like this three or four story thing, just 50 feet away.
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You know, obviously it s just beautiful, it s incredible, it looks like it costs like $50 million.
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We were talking about whether or not we would live there.
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Obviously, if I was given it for free, I would take it in a heartbeat, but if I had the opportunity to buy it and move in and spend the time in maintaining it and making it in my own, you know, fulfill my own wants and needs, I don t know if I would do it, because I like just living like a real simple life, because I know if I m happy with low expectations, you know, I m gonna be pretty happy in general.
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I will say, though, that place is frickin  rad.
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Yeah, it looks awesome.
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It is amazing.
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It looks like if I could be Spider-Man and shoot my web over there and just swing over right into a window, I d really love to see the inside, just to see what it s like.
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It looks like if Tony Stark had to live in New York, he would live in that place.
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Or the top of the Fantastic Four building or something.
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It s unbelievable.
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Spending the 50 million to pick it up and deal with it, it s a whole bunch of responsibility that it seems like, and I don t know why I get this feeling about you, but it seems like you wouldn t want.
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I don t own and I don t rent.
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Where do you live?
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I tend to Airbnb or do kind of, let s call it super couch surfing.
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I ve been doing business in New York for a really long time, let s say over 20 years.
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I know a lot of people.
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I have a lot of goodwill around.
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the places where I go.
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So if I know someone s leaving for six months because he s got business in Germany and he has this enormous apartment in, you know, a great area, you know, I ll just outright ask, like, hey, can I stay there?
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And often, I can t.
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There s no one else staying there and they don t want an Airbnb because their place is precious.
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I always stay in great places, but right now I m Airbnb-ing.
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I like an extended Airbnb.
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So the benefit of Airbnb is, here s the problem with renting in New York, is it s first one s rent, last one s rent, several security deposits which you re never going to see again guaranteed.
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Yeah, practically a DNA sample.
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The last place I rented, I need five letters of reference, I needed a reference from two different business partners, I needed a letter from my account and a letter from my lawyer, and then I needed to go in and meet everyone in the building.
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What?
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That s ridiculous.
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There was only like three other people in the building, but I still had to meet them all.
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It was up to me to schedule appointments with them and meet them.
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and they were all big shots in their field, so it was very hard to do.
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And then they had to approve of me, and then any problem I had, like let s say it was a Saturday night and I had the stereo on a little bit too loud, I would get phone calls, and I had to turn it down.
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And you re locked in too for a long time, so what if you wanted to move to Florida for a month?
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What happened was, this was just really a few months ago, and I d been kind of aiming in this direction.
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I kind of closed down a couple of leases that I had.
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I was renting an apartment upstate and an apartment here.
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I closed them down, I didn t renew, and I hired somebody to go to
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both places while I was away, so she wasn t sentimental at all about my belongings, and I said, just throw out or donate or keep everything.
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Like, I don t want anything.
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And so I was left with one bag with about three outfits in it, actually not the outfit I m wearing, I have since recycled the outfits, and one bag with computer, phone, and iPad.
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And that was my only belongings.
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And so now when I go to Florida for a month, I ve moved to Florida for a month.
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Now though, because we re doing this podcast here, I actually quote unquote live around the corner from here.
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So convenience is very important to me, more than like the size of the place.
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I agree with that.
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There s something about, and I don t know if it s just a creative thing in our brains, but if I live
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somewhere that s amazingly convenient to other things, I will do them, but if I live even 10 extra feet away from something, I won t do it.
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I won t go to the beach, because it s seven stairs down this thing, and I will only eat at the same place, because it s right there.
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I mean, that s just how I live my entire life somehow.
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It s so funny, because one time, I was in Thailand, at this island called Samui, so.
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I ve been there.
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It s a great place, it s beautiful, but it was really hot.
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It was August, so it was like 115 degrees outside, and I was finishing up a book, and I remember I went on Tim Ferriss  podcast, and Tim s like, oh, you must be loving Thailand.
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I m like, yeah, I am loving it, because I was sitting there writing my book, which I love doing, and he s like, how s the beach?
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And I said, well, I m looking at it right now, it s about 15 feet outside of my apartment, but I haven t yet been there.
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And he s like, how long have you been in Thailand?
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I m like, oh, I ve been here three weeks already.
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And he started laughing too, like, why haven t you been to the beach?
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And it was just, it was too hot.
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Like, I didn t want to go outside.
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This might be my Jewish side, right?
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Where I m just like, it s too hot, I don t want to schvitz.
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I m in the AC.
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It could be, but think about like this location.
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Again, for me, convenience is the most important thing.
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This is where I do most of my podcasts.
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So, I live 50 feet away.
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Probably about 20 feet in that direction is one of my favorite bookstores in town.
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over there, which is about another 100 feet.
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It s in my other favorite bookstore.
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So there s good restaurants right here.
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I never leave this one block area, at least right now, until I have to travel somewhere.
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I don t think that s unusual for New York, though.
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I think it s pretty normal.
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I mean, there s a reason that each borough and neighborhood has a different name, and it s because you spend all your time there.
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People didn t really get on the subway to go out to eat and then go home.
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They just walked around and did it.
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If you worked, you got on the subway commute.
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Well, we were just talking about the Wall Street area, where it turned out, by coincidence, in 2009 and 2010, we lived in the exact same building.
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By coincidence.
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I can t believe that.
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You lived in the same building as Art of Charm in 2009, 2010.
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I mean, I know for myself, I never left that area.
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Like, that was the area I stayed put.
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But again, I think that s probably true about New York, and for me, I just have,
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minimal expectations.
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Like it s not like I really am eager to go to a show or go to some fancy restaurant.
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I m just happy really just being as simple as possible.
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I think people think like simplicity and minimalism has to do with possessions, but it has to do with like everything in your life.
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Not wanting as many things for me, like a key to more contentment.
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Do you think it s a key to some sort of creativity as well?
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Because it seems like you re really big on it.
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And I understand, when you have less stuff to worry about, you want fewer things because you re actively getting rid of things.
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But why is that necessary for you, for example?
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Happiness is a really hard thing to find, or contentment, or well-being, whatever you want to call it.
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And I think if your expectations are really far from reality, then you re going to be constantly disappointed.
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Like if I expect
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everybody to like me, or if I expect to make a billion dollars, or if I expect to get a job at Google, or expect to whatever, but the reality is just very far from there, then I m gonna be constantly unhappy.
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So you can almost think of it as like a math equation, like happiness is reality over expectations.
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So reality, I can t really change so much.
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I am what I am, or I can change it slowly.
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But expectations, I can change right now.
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I can say, look, I just want a place that s very simple for me.
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I want to work on only the things I want to work on.
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I want to be around only the people I want to be around.
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And then it s very easy to suddenly jumpstart your happiness by lowering your expectations.
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That s a really good point.
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So instead of trying to achieve different things, which you can also, and should probably also do, you can also make things a little bit more quote unquote realistic, or at least it seems like evolving your goal makes a lot of sense.
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And for a lot of people out there, their goals don t even make sense for them.
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For example, they might want a really cool car and a really cool house and a really cool summer home and a boat,
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but they don t necessarily want any of that stuff for them.
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They end up being unhappy trying to achieve things that they think are gonna make them happy, but that happiness would only come by other people s approval.
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So once you can kind of get rid of that and be like, yeah, I wear the same shirt and the same pants every day, and that s fine for me, you end up with this whole level of simplicity that makes it much easier to be happy.
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And it s not necessarily lowering the bar.
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You re just getting rid of what s extraneous.
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Right, because, for instance, I love to, in many areas of my life, I don t care what people think of me, by simplifying other things in my life, so I m not like on, let s say, business calls all day, I m able to focus on being as good a writer as I can be, like reading a lot, writing a lot, talking to other writers, doing these podcasts, which always kind of kickstart my creativity.
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And look, podcasts make a little bit of money, writing makes a little bit of money, so eventually, you build contacts in your industry from performing at a high level in that industry, and that can lead to other sources of income.
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So again, it becomes this nuanced way of making a living, as opposed to like, oh, I m gonna learn Google SEO and do the latest internet marketing and build this business that venture capitalists are gonna fund until I sell it, and bam, which is a very unrealistic way of thinking.
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It is, and I think it also relies on kind of what we were talking about before, which is like, you gotta fit into one of those memes that s on Instagram.
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You ve gotta have multiple income streams, but passive, and while you work on the beach and all that.
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And I m curious about this, because I think it s probably just maybe a quirk that I have that I need to let go of.
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When somebody sends you negative feedback about a blog post that you ve written or a show, does it ever get under your skin, or do you just let it roll off?
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it does get under my skin.
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And a lot of people say, oh, I don t care.
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And often I will say I don t care because it depends on the comment.
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Like if you get like a hundred bad comments by accident, one or two of them or 10 of them are going to hit those buttons that whatever would have hurt you at the age of 14 is probably going to hurt you now.
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Yeah, like we re always like that 14 year old, like just becoming a physical adult, your brain s just growing out in that way.
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So whatever you re insecure about then, you re probably gonna be a little insecure about now.
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Yeah, it s gonna hit those buttons.
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Not every time, like somebody will write something crazy, I ll just figure, okay, that s the one out of 10 who s not gonna like myself.
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Because no matter what,
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10% of people are just gonna hate you, and maybe 30% of people are gonna be neutral on you, even if you re the best in the world, and then the remaining 60% will have mixed feelings to really like what you do.
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So that 10% is always gonna hate you, and you can say, okay, this is part of that 10%.
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But somewhere in that 30% of people who are on the fence, like, oh, you used to be good, but now it feels like you re blah, blah, blah.
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I think about it a little, like, okay, do I need to improve, do I need to listen to this, or is this just random?
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It does affect me.
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I try to determine, is this gonna be in the category of what I don t care about, or the category of like, okay, I need to listen to this a little bit.
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Yeah, it s hard to make that determination, because it s an emotional one, so often whenever I feel that pluck of whatever it is under my skin, and I m like, I m emotional, I do boomerang, you ever use boomerang for email?
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It s a tool, it s free, you can use it to snooze an email, among other things, and so I ll snooze that email for a week or two, and then when it comes back, I m like, oh yeah, I saw this.
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Was I really too hard on James Altucher?
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Was I really ill-prepared for this one, or whatever?
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And then sometimes I m like, yeah, I was.
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And then I come right back and go, thanks, you re right, good observation, you must listen to this show really carefully, versus what I wanted to write in the moment, which was,
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F you, you have no idea how hard this is, you know, or whatever it is, and so I try to do that and go back with a clear head, because I probably take it much more seriously than I probably should, so some negative feedback, I just don t care.
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It s like full of mistakes and misspelled words, and I m like, okay, this person is like, it s not all there.
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The worst is an intelligently written piece of negative feedback, because it s so hard to ignore.
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or that.
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That s the worst.
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I usually get that like once a year where someone will actually write a blog post and like trashing me and they ll get some fact wrong but of course that never matters.
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So it gets like tweeted and retweeted and people will call me and I ll lose friendships and this is happening and it s like very, I mean this happened recently.
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I wrote to the person and said you know there s a lot of inaccuracies in what you wrote.
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You re affecting other people not just me.
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you re a lawyer, this person was a lawyer, you should probably take it down.
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And that person did realize, uh-oh, he s right, I m damaging him, I m gonna take it down.
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But then once something s syndicated out there, it shows up on random sites, and so every now and then I have to write to the person and say, look, now it appeared on this site.
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of India or whatever that site is that copies all your crap.
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Right, some things will and some things won t and you have to care sometimes because I want people to like what I do and I build up an audience and I don t want people to look at wildly inaccurate information when they make their first judgment of me and it is what it is.
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Most of the time, I don t really care what people think of my opinions because I m never gonna change my opinion to satisfy an audience.
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I want people to like the things I pour my soul into.
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I realize not everyone s going to like that, but I want people to like that.
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Hey, Art of Charm listeners.
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I m excited to share a new podcast I ve been absolutely binging.
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Winning is an everyday mindset, and Craig Robinson and John Calipari are here to help.
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On Ways to Win podcast, Craig and Coach Cal use their on-court wisdom to solve your off-court problems.
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Whether it s trouble at home or a workplace dilemma, the coaches will help you find a winning formula for success.
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You ll hear from prominent athletes, business leaders, and celebrities who reveal insights that made them into the leaders they are today.
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And don t miss President Obama sharing how he deals with pressure by projecting confidence, believing in your team, and taking criticism.
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Thanks for listening and supporting the show.
2
SPEAKER_03
Now let s get back to James Altucher.
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It s tough because when you create stuff, and I think this is almost cliche, and you put yourself out there so much, especially the way you do it with all this vulnerability and things like that, and the amount of work that goes into, say, producing a podcast and stuff like that, to have somebody be like, yeah, you know, it s not, you re not good at it, like, this is crap.
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Sometimes you re just like, whatever.
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But other times, you know, it depends on your mood, and I m just kind of glad to hear that I m not the only one who takes their craft, quote unquote, too seriously, and lets it get to them sometimes, because I do know better.
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and I have tons of ways to deal with it, but it doesn t mean that when something comes into the inbox, I m not like, oh, ouch, wasn t ready for that today, or whatever.
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Yeah, or like, let s say you re in a corporate environment, let s say you re in a cubicle on Procter & Gamble, and one of your coworkers
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put you down, you re gonna be affected by it, because we re tribal animals, and that s the tribe you put yourself in, and every tribe in primate history has a hierarchy from alpha to omega, and if someone s putting you down, they re trying to force you down the tribe, and that s going to create this evolutionary response that just feels horrible, like every neurochemical in your body is gonna start firing, like you re under attack.
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Stress levels, yeah.
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So if somebody who s not, who you don t care about so much, like they re way beneath you in the hierarchy or whatever, in whatever hierarchy you place yourself in, if they start attacking you, you re like, whatever.
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But if someone who you can t tell or they re hitting the right buttons somehow is trying to like move you down, it blasts you.
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It does, yeah.
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And I ll say that usually my biggest regrets come from the responses that I write if I do an emotional reply.
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Like, I don t know if this ever happened to you, but I think of these times where I fired something back and then I m like, oh, I feel like such an idiot.
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And you ll get an email back from that person like, I really liked what you did, but I m really annoyed now that you wrote this.
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And like, oh, you ve lost some shine.
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And I feel like, oh, it just so burns.
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It s like disappointing one of your kids or something.
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Yeah, what you see is what you get.
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The type of person I am in my writing, I want that to be me.
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So some of my writing is aspirational in the sense that I don t necessarily give advice, but I talk about situations I ve been in where I ve failed, or where I ve been miserable, or where I ve been dead broke, and how I came back from that.
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And usually I came back from that by doing positive things in my life, and I wanna still be that person.
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I wanna be that person as much as possible, but it s really hard.
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You can t always be,
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doing this positive thing, this positive thing, eating well, exercising.
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There s like 100 positive habits you need to be Superman.
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You can t do all 100 every day.
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Yeah, it s very, very difficult.
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Would you have any advice for somebody who s maybe working a regular job and is afraid to disappoint their boss and disappoint their family and disappoint their significant other?
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Because I feel like a lot of people that are personal development oriented or just successful or have potential, you know, for the youngins,
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we re always afraid of letting people down.
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And in the process, we let ourselves down a lot of the time.
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I ve talked about this before on my blog and my podcast and my books, and this is the key thing I always try to remember.
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The key thing is it s not about them.
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It s not about your spouse or your friends or your teachers or the government or your boss.
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It s always about you.
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So it s not that I m afraid to disappoint them.
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It s that I m not,
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somehow secure enough in what I m doing to be my own person.
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And so when I remember that, I say, okay, here s the checklist, I need to get back into that.
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And so the checklist is simply, the first thing is, am I physically healthy?
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Because if I m sick, I m always gonna disappoint everyone.
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That doesn t mean being Superman at the gym and eating only broccoli, but it does mean, you know, eat pretty good, sleep eight hours a day.
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Nobody in the world can only sleep three hours a day.
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There s all these people who claim, oh, I only need three hours of sleep.
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They re either lying or they re sociopaths, like it s impossible.
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So eat well, sleep eight hours a day, and move, do some movement.
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Like you can t get no exercise and expect your body to be totally healthy.
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So that s physical.
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Emotional, be around people you like and who you enjoy being around with and who are not toxic to you.
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Now sometimes you can t be totally selfish, you have to be around people who you might wanna help or you don t necessarily enjoy being around, but in general,
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Try to be around people who are inspirational to you, and you like and enjoy, and that s emotional.
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Creative, the creativity, I think of it as a muscle, and Stephen King writes about this in his book On Writing.
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He got into a bike accident and was in bed for six months, and when he got out of bed and started writing again, he literally said he couldn t put two sentences, he couldn t put two words together in a sentence.
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And that s Stephen King, who s, whether you like him as a writer or not, he s like the best-selling writer of all time, almost.
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And incredibly prolific.
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They said he literally couldn t write two words together.
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So creativity s a muscle you have to exercise every day.
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So every day I try to be creative in some way or other, whether it s writing or something else, usually writing or podcasting or whatever.
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And the final thing is, be grateful.
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And I try to be grateful for difficult things.
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So it s easy for me to be grateful for children or whatever, but let s say you re in traffic in the city.
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We were just talking about traffic before the podcast.
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I could think to myself, oh man, I m stuck in traffic, I m gonna be late for my meeting.
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That s complaining.
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Or you can be grateful and say, I m in the most amazing city in the world, that s why everyone else is here, how great is it that I m here?
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Always try to recognize when you re complaining and replace it with some gratitude.
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So those four things, physical, emotional, creative, gratitude, I try to check the box on those things at least once a day.
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And what I found was, I ve had some of the most horrible things happen to me even in the past year and a half, two years.
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When those things happen, if I just get back to checking the box on those four things, I ll bounce back super fast.
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And I always see it s faster and faster now each time.
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It s like mindfulness where if you meditate a lot, you can kind of zip back into it.
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But if you don t, it takes forever to shut everything out and do it.
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So it s like the gratitude habit or looking for the positive habit versus trying to do it only when everything is down.
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It ll be really hard.
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But if you ve been doing it for a year, you re good.
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Mindfulness is a great example because people say, oh, meditate and that replaces, you know, there s all this science, meditation replaces antidepressants or other people meditate because they want enlightenment, they call it enlightenment or whatever.
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Here s what meditation is.
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It s just how do you catch yourself when you re thinking crappy things so you stop thinking about them for a mini second.
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Like, that s all it is.
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Meditation is just
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training for the 15 minutes or 45 minutes or hour a day you meditate is just training for those other 23 hours where you might dwell on, oh, well my boss said this so I should say this or I should say this.
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It s just training for those moments when your brain starts to cycle and you can get out of it and say, no, I m gonna be grateful because now maybe I hate my boss so much I m gonna start looking for another job.
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So as opposed to just dwelling on how you should respond to them or something.
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So it has nothing to do with magic powers or enlightenment or depression, it s just how do you get out of that dwelling that happens.
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Now, you mentioned that in the past, and even now, your life is sort of
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dramatically changing all the time.
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Move to Florida, move over here, move down there, get rid of all your possessions, dive into this, eject forcefully out of that, whatever.
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Do you thrive on that or do you find it exhausting?
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And why do you think that happens to you while most people just stay pretty routine?
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I don t know, I ve asked myself that question.
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I think I m not really a big risk taker, but what ends up happening is I m pretty stupid in a lot of areas, and so I take risks that I don t realize I m taking, and sometimes good things happen, and success results, and other times bad things happen, and I have to figure out my way out of the hole I ve just created.
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And so I think we all have different abilities to assess risk.
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I think nobody really wants to take huge risks.
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I think actually the most successful entrepreneurs
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will mitigate risks as much as possible.
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I think again, you don t really fully know yourself until you attempt a little bit to get out of your comfort zone.
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Like your comfort zone s this tiny little area inside your overall life zone.
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And so you don t really know what your life zone is, like what your potential is in life until you re sort of punching your way out of your comfort zone.
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But you have to only go a little bit of the way each time.
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And maybe sometimes I go too far out of the way.
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Or sometimes it s just life happens.
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Like you might be involved in a business and it turns out
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something completely random happens, which it would have been really hard for you to mitigate that risk, and the business blows up, and you have to figure out your way out of it, and then hopefully in the future, you ve learned enough that you won t get into that same risk again, but there was no way for you to have known in advance this was a potential risk.
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And so I do take chances, and sometimes I know what the risks are, and sometimes I don t, and then I get into trouble.
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And so, chaos results, and I have to fight my way out of it.
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I think that s no different than anyone else.
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Look, you ve been in these hostage situations where you had to get yourself out of it.
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You didn t know what risks you were taking.
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You wouldn t willingly go into those situations.
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So I had a situation, this was about a year and a couple months ago.
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I was on the board of this company and the company had a billion in revenues.
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But the largest shareholder owed like, I don t know, some amount on his taxes.
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The bank found out about this, shut down our loan, which needed to pay employees.
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So the entire company basically disappeared within four days.
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Like a billion revenue company.
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And the bank came in and took over and sold bits and pieces to other companies, so nobody lost their jobs.
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But I, as a shareholder, a major shareholder, lost an enormous amount of money.
3
SPEAKER_00
And normally that would have just like destroyed me for a year.
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At that moment, it was an emergency board meeting, I was at something else.
3
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You ve had Brian Koppelman on your podcast.
3
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So I was on the set of Billions, the TV show Billions.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and so Brian had invited me, and I was watching the premiere episode of season one being filmed, Damian Lewis, all these famous people were there, and I was learning so much, and I was having a great time.
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Then I get this text, emergency board meeting, get on the phone right now.
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So I disappear for an hour, I find out I m about to lose this enormous, life-changing amount of money, and then I have to go back for the next six hours to enjoy what s like one of the best days of my life on the set of this TV show.
3
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and I was able to do it.
3
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And afterwards, I told Brian the story and Brian was like, whoa, we didn t even realize you were just happy and asking questions and laughing with everyone else.
3
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We thought you had just gone to the bathroom for a long time.
3
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And so, I realized that following this practice I do does allow me to bounce back quickly because, look, life s short.
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When am I gonna be on the set of my favorite TV show again?
3
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And, you know, I wasn t gonna spend that money anyway during my short lifetime.
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So, you just have to kind of like,
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realize what s important to you at every given moment and stick to some practice, some code that you re gonna live by and really be serious about.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s amazing that a company like that can go away overnight.
3
SPEAKER_01
It must have been an enormous amount of money owed to the government and like a criminal level of liability.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, which is why I won t even get specific about it because it s all alleged still.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it s, you know, the one thing is every board member was called in to talk to various officials.
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I was the one board member.
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called in.
3
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They re like, this guy doesn t know squat.
3
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And it s like, you know, the law firm was like, we got to prepare you.
3
SPEAKER_00
So send us all your emails.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I sent them like 200,000 emails.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then I go in to the law firm and it s a bunch of people and they re asking me all these questions.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, I don t know.
3
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I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they re like, you know what?
3
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You have to know something because otherwise there s another problem.
3
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And I m like, well, here are the things I do know.
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So I did know enough that there s not a problem, but I knew so little about the mechanics of what happened underneath that, that wasn t the reason I was on the board, to have anything related to what would happen.
3
SPEAKER_00
But, so.
3
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I feel like a trophy wife on the board.
3
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He gave us a bunch of startup capital.
3
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He s been pretty much useless ever since then.
3
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I was useless in terms of the mechanics of the business.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, what I would do is, just how they presented themselves to the public, I helped them a little bit with that, but otherwise I had no clue at all.
3
SPEAKER_00
That is so funny when you tell the story like this.
3
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Speaking of risk, though, don t get mad at Jenny Blake, but she told me that you mitigate risk in some kind of strange ways, and you do this a lot even in your personal life.
3
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Jenny Blake, author of Pivot, super nice woman, amazing, super friendly and cool.
3
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She said you guys went to a movie and you had bought duplicate tickets or something in case the Fandango machine didn t work.
3
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So, Jenny, author of Pivot, book comes out September 6th, she s got a great podcast.
3
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We were going out with like four or five of our friends, and I know when anyone asks me to a movie, I ve just got to make sure everything goes okay.
3
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It s like a weird thing with me.
3
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And I ve never had to take advantage of this, and so they kind of caught me, and it almost was weird.
3
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But we get there, and it turns out the tickets they bought, they bought like five or six tickets, the tickets they bought were for the next day s showing.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I ve done that before.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so we re all gonna be disappointed.
3
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I really wanted to see the movie, so I knew in advance I really wanted to see the movie.
3
SPEAKER_00
I know there s always a one in a thousand chance someone s gonna mess up, so I bought six tickets for the same show in advance, just in case, and I wasn t gonna use them, and I wasn t gonna embarrass myself by telling them I bought these tickets until we weren t allowed in, and they were all like thinking, oh no, what are we gonna do?
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, listen, everybody, I have one possible solution if you wanna make use of this, and so we did.
3
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Not only that, we got tickets reimbursed so we can go to another movie.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re all planning on going to another movie at some point.
3
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, I tried to, I ll do this in many cases, like restaurant reservations and movie tickets, all small things.
3
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But I ve done it as far as plane reservations and so on.
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But in general, I try to take the risk out of any situation.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I felt like then, they thought it was so weird.
3
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They were asking me about it afterwards.
3
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It was almost embarrassing the fact that I saved the movie experience.
3
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It s like, what, you don t trust us?
3
SPEAKER_01
Granted, you shouldn t have trusted us, because we blew it, but like, what the hell, man?
3
SPEAKER_01
You didn t know that.
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Anybody can make mistakes.
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I figured, you know what, just in case, I m gonna buy the tickets also.
3
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Restaurants, movies, I get it.
3
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But with planes, are these things you can t always cancel and get reimbursed, and you re just like, this is insurance for this, because I really need to get to this Oscar party.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to miss it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I bought two plane tickets on two flights.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and it might be exactly an Oscar party.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I did that for an Oscar party.
3
SPEAKER_01
Really?
3
SPEAKER_01
What a guess.
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SPEAKER_01
Elton John s Oscar party.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nice, yeah, because if you miss the flight, it s like, I need to get to LA, and they re like, whatever, bro, and then you just miss the Oscar party.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
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So, and I ll do that with, if I have friends coming in from out of town, like hotel rooms, because sometimes hotels will fill up in weird ways, or you won t like one hotel and you need another.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, and I try not to spend too much money on this, but it has helped me a lot.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s added to my quality of life, the little bit I ve spent on this.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think that makes a lot of sense, especially if you can calculate something where you can get reimbursed.
3
SPEAKER_01
It only costs you a little bit of time to make a duplicate restaurant reservation.
3
SPEAKER_01
It only costs you a little bit of time to get duplicate movie tickets, because you can always get those kind of refunded unless they re being totally unreasonable.
3
SPEAKER_01
Even a restaurant might have a cancellation fee, but it might be like $10 per guest or something like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I feel like New York s the only place that has cancellation fees for reservations, just so that you don t have a no-show.
3
SPEAKER_00
But like, let s say you re going on a date, right, and you find a great place, and you get there, and somehow something messed up, okay, don t worry, there s the other great place, one block away, where I also have a reservation.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I even go further.
3
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I ll go there in advance and introduce myself to the hostess or host or whatever and I ll even plan like a joke.
3
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Like one time I was gonna meet someone at a place and this was a date situation.
3
SPEAKER_00
I went there an hour in advance.
3
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The hostess was from a completely different background than me in every way.
3
SPEAKER_00
You would look and clearly like we wouldn t know each other at all.
3
SPEAKER_00
We made a whole plan where I would go in with my date and this woman would say to me,
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, James, I haven t seen you in forever.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I would say, Leticia, how s your mom doing?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, this is incredible.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the day was like, you two know each other?
3
SPEAKER_00
This is my cousin.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we never broke character for like the whole evening.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it s worth it to kind of plan these things in advance, because there s fun you can do with it as well.
3
SPEAKER_00
Not only mitigates risk, but there s fun you can have.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s really funny, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And of course, so you get the added bonus of, look, I m making a duplicate reservation.
3
SPEAKER_01
Worst case scenario, it s gonna be a funny joke.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
Worth it every time.
3
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Thanks for listening and supporting the show.
3
SPEAKER_01
For a list of all the amazing sponsors and discount codes, visit theartofcharm.com slash advertisers.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, back to James Altucher.
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You do share a lot of failures, and you re very detailed in your thought process, which I think is really, that s the helpful part about sharing failures.
3
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Well, I think a lot of people say, oh, I failed, and then they focus on, but now I m like an all-star basketball player.
3
SPEAKER_00
But people really want to know the details.
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of the failure because A, there s a voyeuristic aspect of it.
4
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B, they relate to it more when you give the actual specific details.
4
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That s what storytelling is about, is getting the details.
4
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And I don t know, they want to take pleasure in your failure, too.
4
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Does that ever make you feel a little bad?
4
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I can t believe I m admitting this, but I might as well.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes when people who are successful, even if I m rooting for them to kill it and helping them do it, there s a part of me that I m very ashamed of, and it s a small part, thankfully, where if something doesn t work out, I m like,
4
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oh good, I still stack up well against this person.
4
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And it s like such an annoying, shameful part of my competitive nature.
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Yeah, the only reason I think people do that with me, that same thing, is someone on Quora, I think it was, asked, why do you like James Aldrich?
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He s so annoying.
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And someone wrote, he s like the light at the end of the tunnel.
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You could be in a really bad, dark tunnel, but James shows that, just by writing about it, that there is a way out, usually.
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It doesn t matter how bad it gets.
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Someone could die, you could lose all your money, you could get divorced.
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You have ups and downs in terms of what you are as a person, but yeah, at the end of the day, you can come out.
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Even fall and fail again, I now have a little bit more confidence that I ll come out of it, like this experience just 14 or 15 months ago.
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Oh, that was that recent, I didn t realize that.
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Yeah, so while I was writing about previous financial failures, I had an enormous financial failure.
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Now, I m old enough and I ve come back enough that I do well.
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I have the classic multiple sources of assets and so on.
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But this was a big source and it completely fell apart.
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But it didn t really affect my life at all because I have a skill set of coming back from these things.
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You probably don t even do this because it might just be depressing to look at
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all the ups and downs, do you ever revisit that stuff or is it just it s over and you don t think about it anymore?
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I revisit it because I want to understand what happened and not make the same mistakes again.
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You re always the same person at heart so it s very possible to make the same mistakes again.
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People intellectually think they know what they did when they make a mistake but the reality is often it s very subconscious in ways that would surprise you if you really knew.
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You need to do deliberate practice about yourself.
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So you need like a mentor or a coach or something or read a lot of biographies and so on and you need feedback on how you re doing, feedback from people who are outside of you who might see these subconscious things happening with you again.
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You need to constantly be thinking about improvement because that is how you improve.
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You re not gonna improve by accident, you re gonna have to work at it.
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Are you more comfortable learning from failures than wins in some way?
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Well, think about any sport or game.
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And you ve interviewed high-performance athlete coaches.
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The main way you learn is from failure.
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So, for instance, I am a very good chess player.
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I m a ranked chess master.
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You have chess player hands.
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Yeah, I have chess player.
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That s what my daughter told me.
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Oh, is it really?
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We went to a park, and some guy wanted to play, and I sat down and played.
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And she took a photo, and both of us had
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kind of his hair all crazy.
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But if I win a game, I think to myself, oh, of course I won that game, I m a genius.
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But if I lose a game, that s when you re like, what did I do wrong?
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And you go over every single move, you run the move into the computer, you look at books, here s where Kasparov, Karpov veered off of what I did, why did they veer off of what I did, and you think about every move, and you go over with an instructor, the instructors only wanna see the failures.
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And you see like every world champion in history, they totally examine their failures.
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They ll write books about their failures just because that s how it helps them to understand.
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Or like one world champion in the 40s and 50s, Mikhail Bodvinnik, he would play these practice matches where someone would blow smoke in his face during the game.
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And he hated smokes and he hated smoking.
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So he would put him in the most negative situation possible so he could learn to be good in these negative situations.
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not like chess s high-performance athletics, but you still have to play at a high-performing level intellectually and mentally and even physically.
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I mean, the best players now do work out in a gym because you have to be physically strong and have stamina.
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So you always learn in general from failures.
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But in real life, it s the same thing.
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It s all a game.
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So A, you don t take things personally.
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And B, it helps you to understand this is how people learn in games.
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You do the same things in real life.
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That smoke thing is like the chess equivalent of in the army, they re like shooting blanks off over your head while you re crawling through mud and under the barbed wire.
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Or when you re running along the balance beam and they re hitting you with like pugil sticks to try to knock you off.
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Or in law school, right, you had to like argue in front of fake courts because you want to know what it feels like to have that adrenaline level while you re playing or while you re arguing in court.
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You could only do that if you really picture it in advance, if you practice it in advance, if you study it afterwards.
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Like this is what improvement s about, is kind of examining your failures.
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You get feedback from failure.
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You don t really get feedback from a win because you don t know where it was that you suddenly won.
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But you really do want to know where it was that you failed.
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So this is a big stock market thing.
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Everybody thinks in an up market that they re a genius and that they know how to make money and they can mint money.
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And then when the stock market falls, they re like, oh my God, it s my broker s fault, or it s the government s fault, or it s the Democrat s fault, or the Republican s fault.
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They always want to blame someone else because they thought they were a genius when things were going well.
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But you have to always assume I m not a genius when things are going well, but I m gonna learn when things are going poorly.
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It s always my fault when things are going poorly.
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It s like extreme ownership.
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If you look at Jocko, you know, Jocko Willink is a Navy SEAL.
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He wrote this book, Extreme Ownership, where- I like that title.
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And it s just what it sounds like.
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It s whenever anything goes wrong, it s always some part your fault, so you have to figure out what that fault is.
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Even if the fault is you hired,
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somebody who s not up to the task and you didn t train them well or you weren t paying attention to what the higher-ups were doing enough such that you could prevent the problem from trickling down to your level or whatever.
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I mean, there s always some aspect.
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Oh my God, that s so true.
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I m gonna read that book because
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I m in a situation right now where I m involved with lots of different business activities and writing activities and so on, but I have one situation which is a little bit negative, and I m thinking to myself, why is it negative?
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What did I do?
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And what I did was maybe four or five layers of life removed.
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It had to do with some other relationship I had which trickled over.
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and I didn t make that connection, I wouldn t have made that connection unless I really thought about it.
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Everything you do has consequences.
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And so if something has a negative consequence, you can t keep it isolated from other areas of your life.
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Like if I m having an argument, let s say, one of my children, that might have a negative consequence on a business situation.
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Like maybe I was arguing so much, it threw me off my game on a business meeting a day later.
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And then six months later, they asked me, well, why did you,
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missed that plane, or why did you cancel speaking at this conference?
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And it all has consequences, it all trickles around, so you kinda, it s not that positive thinking s important, I don t believe in that at all, but taking this extreme ownership, I just love that phrase, is really important in trying to be positive in as many areas of life as possible, trying to improve because recognizing that you can t compartmentalize, there s no such thing,
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every part of your life is connected to every other part of your life, being strong with your network because how you treat one person is gonna affect how you treat the other 30 people in your life, and so on.
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All these things are important.
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What s the lesson from your failures that you still have yet to learn?
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And I don t mean the one that you can t see, but like an alcoholic who knows he needs to stop drinking but just won t do it, what s the lesson that you re resisting?
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I think I do have somewhat of an addiction to drama.
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So as much as I intellectually say I don t want any drama in my life, I want things to be simple, I m gonna get rid of all my possessions, I m gonna live simply, almost like monk-like, I think some part of me gets extremely frustrated or unhappy or bored.
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I get attracted to situations that are a little bit more dramatic.
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or I allow myself to get sucked into them, thinking that I m gonna have some sort of pleasure out of them, and that has consequences.
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So by pleasure, I don t necessarily mean like going all over the place, taking drugs, and having sex with hookers.
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It could mean anything.
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Have you ever had no money?
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I don t know if you ve had no money.
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I ve had no money.
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I ve had like, well, negative money is a joke, because if you have negative money, that s actually better than having no money.
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It is.
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That usually means there s some, if you have negative money, that means you owe somebody, and then there s a negotiating tension that you could monetize somehow.
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Having zero money is the worst, because then nobody cares at all.
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Right, you re invisible, right?
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Right, and so yes, I ve had situations with no money, and then people really do not care, and you realize quickly, all the people you thought would care, do not care at all, and you really have to figure out, what am I going to do?
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I have two kids, I need a place to live, I used to have a lot of money,
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Now I have zero, I don t even have negative, I have zero, and I ve gotta figure out how to live, because no one else is gonna figure it out for me.
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You ve had tons of money, no money, and I gotta put this in air quotes, normal lifestyle, like now, it s not normal at all for most people, but it s... Yeah, I would say, by the way, I don t think I ve had a normal lifestyle for about 20 years.
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So I quit my last corporate job August 31st, 1997.
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I haven t had a, I would say, a normal lifestyle since then.
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Because when you run a business, say, it s 24 hours a day.
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we can t leave, as you know with the podcast, it s not like you can leave the work in the office.
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You re no longer a civilian going to work with the other civilians, and I don t want to say this in a negative way, I think it s great to be a civilian.
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and have a good life, but you re no longer a civilian, you threw yourself out there into this much larger, much more complicated world, and whether your life is negative or positive is not normal at all.
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So you ve had tons of money, you had no money, had a baseline, stable lifestyle, I should say, like now, and we all know lots of people probably in all these different scenarios, where were you the most happy and content and the most sane at the same time?
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I mean, this sounds like a cliche, but I am the most normal, happy, content, insane right this moment.
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So, and it sounds like a cliche because I feel like I ve even heard people say that.
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It s almost like you re supposed to say.
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Right, but look, I m really enjoying this, doing these podcasts with you.
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We ve hung out a couple times, but this is like the most extended time we ve talked.
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I m doing well financially, I m doing well in not 100% of my relationships, but most of them, I m really happy right now.
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but A, my expectations are incredibly low, so I could die tomorrow and I m happy with that, too.
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It s a problem when you tell people that.
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I would tell, let s say, the girl I m seeing, I would say, oh, I m happy if I die tomorrow, and she d get really upset.
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The only one I don t really tell to is my kids.
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They would get really upset if I said, yeah.
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They would be pretty sad, yeah, I think so.
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Where were you the most excited for the future, with lots of money, no money, or stable?
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The first time I sold a business, I was super excited about the future.
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I was like, man, this business worked, I m a genius, I m gonna keep making a ton of money, I m gonna be a billionaire at some point.
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I wasn t even thinking about right now, I should have just been enjoying right then.
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which I never did.
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I never celebrated the fact that I sold this business, and for the first time in my life, I had more than zero dollars in the bank.
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I had actually a significant amount of money in the bank.
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And I immediately said, I m such a genius because of this, so I poured all that money into other investments and other huge purchases.
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Of course, I almost immediately lost all of it.
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It was like $15 million cash.
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Went to zero.
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I m not bragging about it because I went to zero from that.
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Zero dollars.
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I remember at one point I went to the ATM and I had $143 in the bank.
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And I m thinking, like, what am I gonna do?
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I have no source of income.
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I had already jacked up all my expenses.
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I had no clue what was going to happen.
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But when I sold that business,
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I thought the future has no end.
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And I think this is why, if you look at billionaire investments, billionaires are obsessed with anti-aging companies.
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Because it s really great to have a billion dollars, so you don t want it to end.
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So you just invest in, oh, if I just inject myself with the stem cells of a three-month-old baby all the time, I m gonna be perpetually young.
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And they research this stuff, and they spend hundreds of millions researching this.
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It actually is really great to have a billion dollars.
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So, I don t understand that exact feeling, but I can get it.
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And, because they want to look forward to a future of constantly having a billion dollars for hundreds of years.
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You know, now I avoid looking forward to anything in the future.
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I m really happy right now, and my mistake back then of learning from my failures, my mistake was focusing too much on a future that never existed.
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I think that s an important realization.
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I think a lot of people maybe come to that when they re dying.
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Again, a cliche, crap, I never thought about what I was doing right now.
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They can t move.
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Oh yeah, it s kind of like the rest of the dying.
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I wish I had done what I really wanted to do, or I wish I had spent more time with my friends.
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That s almost a cliche too, but it s so true that, look, spend time with people you like and do what you want to do.
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And people say, well, I can t do that.
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take care of the kids in the morning, and then I gotta pay the mortgage, so I gotta work the nine to five job.
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I get it.
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I always tell people, start writing down 10 ideas a day, so this will start exercising that creativity muscle, that idea muscle.
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You won t have a good idea, so write 10 bad ideas a day, and maybe after six months, your idea muscle will be exercised enough, and you ll start to come up with good ideas that can help you get out of this situation, but you won t know until you do it every single day for six months.
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You have to exercise that muscle.
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So it s really important, and it s what I had to do.
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So when I first went broke, this was like in 2000, starting around June of 2002, I did start exercising this idea muscle, and by 2003, let s say six months later, I had started to figure out for the first time in years, money was coming in, opportunities were happening, I had made a complete shift in careers,
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Lots of things happen because this idea of muscles started being exercised.
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And I make sure I still, to this day, do that every single day.
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Is there anything that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure you deliver?
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Like, the bit of wisdom that you re like, I can t believe you didn t ask me this.
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Come on.
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No, this was great.
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You know what people should do is also listen to you on my podcast, The James Altucher Show, because that was a fascinating podcast.
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So you re listeners who don t know every single thing about you.
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I think we covered some stuff.
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Probably you didn t even cover on your own podcast.
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I agree, I ll link to that in the show notes of this episode.
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Excellent, well thanks a lot Jordan.
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Thank you.
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Interesting show, you know, he never disappoints.
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He s had a lot of money, he s had no money, he s had normal lifestyles, he s had the lifestyle that he s designed for himself now, which is anything but normal.
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An interesting guy to learn from in terms of his success, and more importantly, his failures, as he is so open about them.
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And I hope you enjoyed this one.
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Don t forget you can thank James on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well as other resources and books mentioned on the show.
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You can tap our album art in most of your mobile podcast players to see the cheat sheet, the show notes for this episode right on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter.
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I m at theartofcharm.
5
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Great place to engage with me there.
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Post a lot of stuff there as well.
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Boot camp and live program details for our live residential programs here at AOC.
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Check it out at theartofcharm.com.
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We sell out a few months in advance, so if you re interested, or you may be interested, or you re kind of thinking maybe someone else is interested, get in touch ASAP, get some info from us, plan ahead, and don t forget about our Art of Charm challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or if you re here in the States, you can text charmed to 33444.
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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where I created this little mini online course.
5
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It s about improving your networking and connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop personal and professional relationships with you, and we ll also email you our fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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I ve also got regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It ll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed here in the US to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor, and the show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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And go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared somewhere on the web.
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So stay charming, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.