The James Altucher Show

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 audio engineer says. "Don't worry, I'll be good," Tony says. Then the audio engineer went back outside. Tony kept slamming that table. Outside the room, people thought he was going to climb over the table and beat the S**t out of me. But it was all good. BUT... I felt like I had to keep the energy level high. So pretty soon we were both yelling back and forth. He was there because of his new book, "Unshakeable". But we spoke about maybe 1000 topics. Not just the financial world. So let's get right down to it. What did I learn? - EVERY YEAR (on average) THE STOCK MARKET WILL FALL 10% This is great for new

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 handle strangers who could be threats, how to learn who to trust and who not to trust. I wish I had his skills. Not only that. Archaeological evidence says his brain was bigger than mine. And bigger is better. To make things worse, another animal made the entire human race its slave. Wheat domesticated us. It forced us to stick around for the harvest, horde up for years when the harvest might be bad, go from a life of a diverse diet to basically all carbs all the time. And it turned us from hunters to farmers. But it's not all bad. And the news is actually very good. Probably the books I've recommended most in the p

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 retreat into this perfect area of creativity and productivity. A state where Steven and Jamie have spent years trying to hack and re-create at will. And this is what they've done. I was talking to Steven Kotler, who's been on my podcast a few times and Jamie Wheal. They co-authored "Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work." It's sort of a sequel to "The Rise of Superman" all about "flow" in action sports. Steven said. "It's the moments of total absorption where you get so focussed on the task at hand that everything else just disappears, ac

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 reached out to everyone I knew, found a way to get ahold of Cass, who wasn't doing any interviews on the book, and managed to book some  time with him. I've written many times before about the effect Star Wars has had on my life. But I was also interested in the phenomenon of Star Wars, a topic Cass writes about. In particular, why was it a hit? George Lucas is the living breathing manifestation of "idea sex". He takes concepts that worked in the past, meshes them together, and knows the combination will work. For example: think of a blonde-haired young man who has to reluctantly save the world from an evil galactic e

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 didn't have an editor or a microphone. Three years later everyone has (or should do!) a podcast. It connects me with people I never thought possible. Or in AJ Jacobs' case, it connects people with family they didn't know existed. That's the theme of his new podcast, "Twice Removed." "The good news is once you realize that everyone is family, you can just choose," AJ said. "So you're not stuck. You've got the whole world to choose from." His first guest was Dan Savage, the sex columnist for "The Village Voice." In the other room, AJ had a secret guest, a relative 41 degrees removed from Dan. Along the way, AJ unravels th

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 the world where you belong... I read an article on Facebook that was going viral:"What I know Now As a Teen With Dsylexia." Anna Koppelman wrote it. Then she kept writing. When I read the article, I thought Anna was one of those alien millennials taking over the world. But even worse, she's not a millenial. Ever since birth she's been on the Internet. She's an eleventh grader. Which makes her 17 or so. Generation Z... it's a totally different animal. Anna started a charity when she was 12 years old. At 14, she asked the Huffington Post to publish her work. They said yes. Then she wrote about dyslexia, bullying, inte

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 inspires hundreds of other women to do the same. Creates a book out of it: The Belly Art Project, and donates the proceeds to charity. "All my life I was taught how to deal with failure," she told me. "My dad would ask us at the dinner table every night: how did you fail today?" HOW DID YOU FAIL TODAY? She got comfortable with failure at an age when every other kid wants to get an A+ at everything. She got comfortable embarrassing herself. For two years she tried to be a standup comedian. "I wasn't very good at it." Practice embarrassing yourself... Ready. Fire. Aim. She got a huge order from Nieman Marcus even thoug

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 was lazy as a kid. I couldn't work so hard. Six billion dollars later, Daymond John sits atop the FUBU fashion empire and I think to myself, "He's one year younger than me."   Do you ever feel that: jealousy? Or if not jealousy, then maybe regret? Like there's so many things you could've done...if only...   The good news is, "if only" has two answers: "You didn't do it then." And..."Start today."   There's never any rush. If today is the day you can start enjoying something, start making money from it, start combining all of your interests into career that lasts one, five, ten y

  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 listen, I learn. And then I can say two sweet words, "thank you."   How many people said, "If Trump becomes president, I'm leaving the country." Or the other way around?   There's only one reason why I'd ever even consider packing. And Bobby Casey spelled it out for me.   "Americans don't understand how insanely expensive it is to live in the U.S.," Bobby said on my podcast.  He sold everything he owned and left the country in 2009. Right after the market crashed. Now he works all over the world. And helps people get off the grid.   I wanted to know how he did it.   And why...   "I hated my customers," he said. "I hated

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 and "no me".   All I can do is have impact on the people around me. And if it's worthwhile impact, if it's the sort of impact that helps people and creates positive change, then those people around me will share it with the people around them.   That's how things get done. That's how one "votes" with their life every single day. No excuse.   2) I'm not the smartest person in the room.   If a situation happens that I don't understand, I don't pretend to understand it. I don't go ahead and act like I understand it.   I have no clue.   So I ask the smartest person in the room. I ask the people who know more than me. I as

"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 Guests."   He interviewed 144 people, including the host Jon Stewart, Craig Kilborn, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee and so many other people.   "You know, Jon Stewart's a guy who had an upper-middle-ish class upbringing in New Jersey, went to William and Mary, came into comedy sideways. He wasn't sure exactly what he was going to do after college."   I needed to know how Jon Stewart did it. How he redefined Late Night. How he broke out and rose to the top of comedy. And how he used humor to disrupt it all - mainstream media, mainstream politics, the news.   "He would wear the same thing in the office everyda

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 Play Made the Modern World"- how the idea of "play" more than anything else, is what created the modern world. "I regret saying this a little, but, the assumption that video games are just a terrible waste of time and that this generation is growing up playing these stupid games is really... it's so wrong," he said. He was talking about using play for education reform. "If you think about it, we walk around with a bunch of assumptions of what a learning experience is supposed to look like: listening to a lecture, watching an educational video, taking an exam to test your learning." I was gonna puke.  "I've been watchi

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 understanding of what real hard work was," Jairek said.   So in college, Jairek went to Canada and stacked lumber.   "You've known me a long time," I said. "What's a weakness I have that you think I can work through?"   "I'll tell you how we find those," he said.   Step 1: Review your values   Jairek said, "Let's do this right now. If I were to ask you what's most important to you in life, what would you say?"   "Humans..." That was number one. Connecting with people I care about.   "Being an honest person who acts with integrity."   "And creativity."   So here's the card game... Imagine you have all the cards face down o

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 smartest in X but..." He said that about his classmates. He said that about his neighbors. He said this about his fellow co-workers. He said this out in the middle of outer space. 350,000 miles away from home. In my podcast, years later, he was still saying that. He's a liar. He got his PhD from MIT in "robot arms on Mars". He went into space twice. He fixed the Hubble telescope so now we can see images like this: By the way, he failed the astronaut exam because his vision wasn't good enough. He then figured out how to TRAIN HIS EYES TO HAVE BETTER EYESIGHT. I never even heard of that before. He passed his next

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.   The point is I care about myself now. And not a lot of people say that.   But it's important.   I should care about me more than anyone else... even my daughters. But sometimes I mess up. Sometimes I love them more than me.   Even on airplanes, they say, "Put your mask on before assisting others." If you put a mask on your baby before you put a mask on yourself, your baby will never know who you could've been.   If I don't put my oxygen mask on first everyday, then my kids, my friends, everyone I meet, won't know who I really am.   They won't know me at my best. They'll know me passed out on the floor because I tried s

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 GPS raining down. Would a pilgrimage, a wandering, solve his problems? I read Kamal's book. The book comes out today. I had him on my podcast (also out today). I wanted to find out how even in our daily lives we can go on a pilgrimage. Even if I'm in a cubicle, can I break free, can I become a wanderer Sometimes I also feel stuck. But I don't want to go away for months at a time. I want a pilgrimage in my life right now! From what I can gather from reading the book, REBIRTH, and talking with Kamal, a pilgrimage has several parts: A) SEEKING AN ANSWER Something happened. Something confusing. Something that wasn't in the

"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 "21". He wrote, "Accidental Billionaires," which became "The Social Network" where Jesse Eisenberg played a seemingly evil Mark Zuckerberg.   The New Yorker sent him just a page with the most powerful word known to man.   "It was just, 'No,'" Ben said, "I was rejected by a janitor at a publishing house because I sent a manuscript to an editor who was no longer working there and the manuscript ended up in the trash can. A janitor took it out of the trash, read it and sent me a rejection letter."   That was his big chance. Not Ben's.   The janitor.   "I've never wanted to write a book," Ben said. "I wanted to write. I wa

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 want just by using the right words and subtly hypnotizing everyone you meet? It sounds like a science fiction novel. But it's true. It's what happened, and it happens every day. Who are the victims? You're the victim. Scott Adams predicted in September 2015(!) that Donald Trump would become President because, "he is the best master persuader I have ever seen." Scott Adams trained as a hypnotist and master persuader for years. "Once you realize that everyone is completely irrational," Scott Adams told me, "your life gets a lot easier. "You can start to use the principles behind this to see why people really do things,

  "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 in my legs. That's the feeling I had in my body the last time I didn't love something. I couldn't sit around anymore. I got up mid-meeting, walked straight to the elevator and left. "I think a lot of people want to leave what they're doing, but they don't know where to go," Gretchen said. A) How to find where to go "I was looking up at the capitol dome," Gretchen said, "And I thought, 'What am I interested in that everybody in the world is interested in?' That's when she wrote her first book, "Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide." Her first step was research. That's also what she did for fun. "That's a big tip-off

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. Not his. Theirs. Dan calls this "irrational behavior." He says, "being irrational are the cases where we think we will behave in one way, but we actually don't. And the reason I care about this is because those are the cases in which people are likely to make decisions." He helps predict behavior. So you can respond the way you'd expect you would... not the way you actually do. "It's an interesting conflict," he says. We talked about his new TED book, "Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations." ------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a shor