The James Altucher Show

I tried to ruin Ryan Holiday's life. Fortunately, I failed. I told him to start an agency, build it up, sell it for 10 million dollars and THEN start writing books. "It's a good thing you didn't listen to me," I said. But I was wrong. It turned out he took my advice. "It made me super unhappy and it cost me a bunch of friendships," he said. "But it's not your fault. I know there are a lot of thing...

"You and I both know what happened to you 18 months ago," he said. "If you don't write about it, you will die as an artist." Tucker's sold over 3 million copies of his books. I know I'm going to have to listen to him. Maybe later. ----- I've known Tucker many years. I can safely, say, I've been in the trenches with Tucker. We've both started businesses since then, published books, invested togethe...

I have a rule. After every podcast, I write down 10 things I learned. I don't know if anyone else does this. Do you do this? Some people make illustrations. They send me what they've learned. It's a creation of a creation of a creation. A drawing of a podcast of someone's life.   But I broke my rule. It's been over a month. And my brain is digging for the lessons from my interview with the creator...

She said, I am an introvert but had to develop tricks to fake being an extravert because of where I worked. I said, Do you think everyone in LA is an extravert? She said, I don't know. Maybe they are all faking. We were at a party. I had been sleeping but a friend called me up and said "you have to go this party three blocks away from you." So I did. Why? Because why not? Sometimes you know to say...

Ben (of Ben & Jerry's) was in the room. He needed a logo. Debbie Millman just started her agency. She was competing against the best ad agencies in New York City. She lost. So she moved on to Burger King. "Why do you think you lost?" "We didn't have insurance," Debbie said. "We didn't have the big, global brand experience to show them." "I'll never forget this," she said. "When we got to Burger Ki...

Tony Robbins stopped by on his birthday. And then he started causing problems. Like he does. "I realize you're high energy," the audio engineer says, looking at Tony, "but when you bang the table it sounds like the whole room is shaking." In 220 podcasts, it's the first time the audio engineer had to interrupt in the middle. "Oh, ok, no problem," Tony says. "I don't want to stop the passion," the...

My ancestor from 70,000 years ago was smarter than me. He knew every plant, mushroom, animal, predator, prey in a several mile radius. He knew how to make weapons. He knew how to capture something, make it edible. I can barely order delivery. And as far as weapons, they say "the pen is mightier than the sword" but I don't think a tweet is. My ancestor also knew how to adapt to new terrains, how to...

Imagine going on a swing as high as you can. Then going higher. Then going so high you loop around. I get scared thinking about it. Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, did it the first time he tried. Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal were training people at Google how to get into the state of FLOW. Sergey volunteered. What is Flow? The state where your brain and body loses all sense of time and you re...

I want to be a Jedi Knight. The idea of surrendering to some "force" greater than oneself. The idea of being in touch with some essence that can bring out my full potential in way that I could never possibly understand. When Cass Sunstein, genius economist (author of "Nudge", 40 other books, does Nobel-prize level research) wrote "The World According to Star Wars", I knew I had to talk to him. I r...

My first podcast is 24 minutes long. It's just me. No guest. The topic: "Why College Is a Waste of Time." Then I did one about my book "Choose Yourself." One week later, I got 30 minutes with Robert Greene. Then an hour with Tucker Max, an hour with Gary Vaynerchuk, and an hour with AJ Jacobs. A month later I interviewed Dr. Wayne Dyer. Two months, Arianna Huffington. Six months, Mark Cuban. I did...

Anna Koppelman is an angel. She's the angel I wish I had looking over me  back when I was being bullied. When I was a kid, it was "Lord of The Flies" on the playground. Nobody cared at all. Kids would kill each other at recess and whoever survived went back to class. But it's different now. Bullying is a thing. It has a voice. And there's a way out of the world of "you're not good enough" and into...

Sara Blakely is weird. I wish I could think like she does. I want to be weird like her. "I look at any object and try to think of any use it has other than what people had planned for it." And then she acts on it. She sees a pair of pantyhose, cuts off the feet (why not?) and creates a multi-billion dollar company, Spanx. She sees her 9 month pregnant belly and paints a basketball on it. And then...

He is exactly one year younger than me, almost to the day. So we could've even grown up together. We had similar interests in music. He could've taught me sewing. I could've taught him how to play chess.   But, to be honest, he worked harder than me. He stood on a corner and sold hats. Then he sold t-shirts. Then he would go to work at Red Lobster all night. Then back to school the next day.   I w...

  I heard an eight-year-old kid tell another eight-year-old that he's not welcome in his home. He said "Trump or Clinton?"   "Clinton."   And that was that. They kept walking. Kept debating and I bet nothing happened. I bet they're still friends.   Some people are either all talk or afraid.   Or both.   I try not to be either. I try to listen, come up with ideas, and be grateful. Because if I list...

Social media is a bloodbath.   Trump. Hilary. Walls. Genitals. Crooked this or Deplorable that.   There's two things I know:   1)  I choose whether I am happy with a situation or not. Whether I am "free" or not. Nobody else can choose that for me unless I give them permission.   If a situation (call it X) happens that I don't like, I ask myself: is the world better with X and me in it. Or with X a...

"We all lived through it. But one fun or interesting realizations I came to in reporting the book was... Can we curse on your podcast?"   "Yeah. Anything goes."   "... Is just how much shit happened in the world between 1999 and 2015."   Chris Smith is the author of The New York Times bestseller, "The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Gues...

I wish I was as smart as Steven Johnson. I asked him, "What is your one favorite thing that everybody thinks is bad for you that is actually good for you?" He didn't want to tell me. "My kids might listen to this later," he said. But he told me... He's the author of "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation," "Everything Bad is Good for you," and the recent "Wonderland: How Pl...

You know that game where you flip a card, see the face and turn it back over, then try to find the match?   That's the game we're going to play...   Write down your values. I told Jairek mine. I had three.   Jairek is a life coach. And Tony Robbins is his dad. But that doesn't matter. Because Tony didn't invest in his son's strengths. He invested in weakness.   "I didn't really have an understandi...

Mike Massimino failed his PhD the first time. Failed the astronaut test the first three times. Failed to get the highest evaluation when he walked into space the first time. And almost destroyed the Hubble Telescope on the last attempt the US was going to make to fix it. But he did it. He did it all. Two things I noticed about him. One thing is he kept saying things to me like, "I wasn't the smart...

It's the most commonly believed lie. It will make you lose all your money. It'll make you wake up in your 40's or 50's and wonder what you're going to do about retirement. It will make you develop your worst possible habits.   For me, it was drinking. And waking up face to floor. I was ugliest when I was unhappy. That's true for everyone.   Unless you hide it with plastic surgery and cocaine.   Th...

Kamal was totally lost. His father had died. His job over. His relationship gone. He felt adrift, depressed, broken. He was so lost he wandered the world trying to find his way back. Twenty years later he wrote the novel about what happened - REBIRTH. The novel is about how he discovered for himself the ancient art of the pilgrimage. How to be a wanderer. How to be lost in a world with too much GP...

"When I was a struggling writer, before I wrote my first book, I got 190 rejection slips."   He taped them to the walls like a serial killer.   "My wallpaper was rejection slips."   "What was the worst one...," I asked Ben Mezrich, a New York Times bestselling author. Over the past five or six years, I've probably read all of his books. He wrote "Bringing Down the House," which became the movie "2...

How can you use mass hypnosis to control 60,000,000 people so they vote for you to become the leader of the world? Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, knows the answer and has known it for years. So I called him and asked. I needed to know. He told me how Trump won. And he told me how anyone can use these persuasion techniques to improve their lives. What if you can get people to do whatever you...

  "When did you decide to go from being a lawyer to a full-time writer?" I asked Gretchen Rubin. She wrote the #1 New York Times bestseller, "The Happiness Project." It was 2001. "At the Supreme Court, I was surrounded by people who loved law. They were reading law on the weekends. They were talking about law at lunch time. They just loved, loved, loved law. And I knew that I didn't." I felt pain...

Dan Ariely was burned all over his body. He lived in the hospital for years. He grew up there. Now he writes about pain. And irrationality. And meaning. He had nerve damage from the burns. And no skin to protect himself from pain. The nurses slowly peeled back his bandages. He begged them to rip them off.   They wouldn't. He wanted quick pain and fast relief. They did it slowly for peace of mind....