The James Altucher Show

You have five minutes to kill. That's it. Those five minutes can make or break a career. I don't think I would be able to handle the pressure. I've done a lot of public speaking. And now I've tried standup. For the past three months I've been going up once or twice a week. It's difficult. I thought 20 years of public speaking would help me. It doesn't. It's the Hunger Games on that stage. So Fred Stoller is my hero. He was a standup comic 30 years ago, then he was a writer on Seinfeld, then he's been a guest start on 60+ TV shows including Seinfeld, Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, Scrubs, and every other show I can think of. He's sitcom history. And he wrote all about it in three excellent books, including his latest, "Five Minutes to Kill", about his five minutes on the 1989 HBO Young Comedians Special and what happened to the specific performers of that show. So I asked, "If everybody thinks you're so funny, then why didn't you have your own show?" But I wasn't the first person to ask Fred this... He aske