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Hey everyone, it's Alex from Alex and Books, and you're listening to The Reader's Journey, the podcast that takes you on a journey to meet amazing authors, discover brilliant books, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Now, let's get started. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Reader's Journey podcast. Today we have James Altsher, author of Skip the Line. James, thank you so much for coming back on the show today.
Alex, always a pleasure. I love talking about books. I do love talking about my books and the ideas in them, but I'm really just happy. I'm happy to talk about any book, really. So knock yourself out. Awesome. Well, I definitely plan on talking about your book and then we can talk about other books towards the end of the podcast. So the title of your book, Skip the Line. Can you tell us what that means and maybe share the story of how you skipped the line to create a TV pilot for HBO? Yeah, so everybody...
Let's say, let's say you're a doctor or a lawyer, you know, I'm taking some traditional profession that all parents and professors and friends and spouses approve of. And, and you wanted to suddenly, um, quit your job and be right. The great American novel.
Everyone's going to say to you, you know, Alex, you can't do that. You studied for 27 years to be the best doctor you could be. And you have three kids and a mortgage. Like how you make a good living on, on being a doctor. You can't. And then, and then to write the great American novel, uh,
You got to like maybe get an MFA at college. You got to write some stories. You got to have some ideas. You're competing against guys like, I don't know, John Grisham and Danielle Steele. And, you know, the guy who wrote The Kite Runner. Like you can't. What makes you think you're going to like just skip the line and be better than all these people? There's a line in place for a reason. You can't do this. And I kept hearing that every time I switched jobs.
Like one time I went from, you know, making websites for a living to wanting to be a hedge fund manager. And I asked my neighbor who was, uh, worked for, I think he worked for JP Morgan at the time. And he said to me, uh, and I almost felt bad for him. Like I could see it in his face that he just really regretted me asking that question. And he's like, uh, no,
you know, typically people get, you know, I don't think you can do that. Like people, typically people get an MBA, then they work for a small bank, then they might work for Goldman Sachs. Then they work for a small hedge fund, a big hedge fund. Then maybe they get some clients and start their own hedge fund. It,
It's really hard to skip the line. You can't, I don't think you can do it. And I just kept being told that over and over again, I've probably switched careers five or six times, which in today's world is maybe not even that abnormal. Like we just naturally switch interests and passions. And there's something to be said about that for a specific reason. But I just kept getting told over and over again, you can't skip the line and, and don't do that. And, and I find when I look back on it,
I found that many of the people who told me you can't do this or you need to, you can't skip the line. I have nothing against them, but I feel like maybe they were saying they can't do it and they didn't want me to change. They didn't want me to skip past them because they liked me the way I was, or they like their life the way that it was. And they didn't want me questioning the path that they chose. And so like, for instance,
An early example and an example I write about in the book was I was a computer programmer at HBO. My title was junior analyst programmer. And one time I had an idea. And so I, instead of talking to my boss about it, who was a manager in the it department, and then there was a, so basically my, I decided to visit the CEO of the company, Jeff Bukas, and he
He was my boss's, boss's, boss's, boss's, boss's, boss's, boss's, boss's. And I'm going to his office, just walking there. And I ran into this woman from the marketing department who I was friends with. And she said, where are you going? I said, oh, I have this idea. I'm going to tell Jeff Bukas about it. And she said, you can't do that. You can't. You got to go through this.
Bruce, your boss, and see what he says. You can't just skip over him. You can't skip the line. And I'm like, well, I'm just talking to Jeff. I don't know. And I...
I go up to like Jeff, because his office is like almost an entire floor in the HBO building. So I get out in the elevator and it's all like, it looks different than any other floor. I walked past the secretary towards his office and she's like, where are you going? And I said, Oh, I want to tell Jeff an idea I have. And she's like, you can't do that. And I just kept, I didn't really ignore her, but I said, Oh, I it's okay. Don't worry. And, uh,
So when people hear that, they just don't worry. And I go into Jeff's office and he looks up from, you know, he's writing something on the, on the table and he's like, who are you? And I'm like, oh, I work in the IT department. I'm building the hbo.com, the website was HBO's very first website.
And I said, listen, just like how HBO became famous for doing original programming, original TV shows was the first cable channel to do that rather than just recycling old movies and so on. Why don't you be the first company making a website that does original web shows? Let's do an actual show on the web. Now we call them podcasts. But, you know, back then there was no name. And so he said, OK.
okay, do whatever you want. It's your, it's your generation. And so I created a show called 3am, which also I shot as a pilot for HBO, which was me interviewing and finding out what was going on in New York city at three in the morning on like a Tuesday or Wednesday night. And I did this for three or four years and a lot of strange, I looked under every rock in New York city, like a lot of strange things were happening in New York city, but it showed me that I
The only difference between me doing this amazing life-changing, I mean, it was a life-changing project for me. I interviewed like 3,000 people during the course of those three or four years at three in the morning. And I learned a huge, huge amount. And the only difference between me doing that and not doing that was a simple, uh,
basically 300 foot walk that I did where everybody along the way kept telling me I can't do it. But there was no downside. What was he gonna do? Fire me for coming up with
An idea that was baked in the culture of HBO that we should be doing original stuff in every medium. And I even say we like you put yourself in the mindset of the company you work for. And I loved HBO and I love their product. So no one was going to fire me. Was my boss going to get upset? No, because if it worked out, he would look good. And in fact, he got promoted like three times after that. And.
And what was the downside for him? Jeff Bukas didn't even know who he was because he didn't even know who I was. And if he said no, he wouldn't have asked. It's not like he would have remembered my name, like fire that guy and find out who his boss is and fire that guy too. No, it was nothing. And by the way, that was in 1995. So about a year ago, like right before the pandemic.
economic lockdowns, I was at a restaurant and I ran into Jeff Bukas, who later became the CEO of Time Warner for many years. He was the CEO for about 20 years. And
I ran into him and I'm like, Hey Jeff. And I hadn't seen him since that time in his office. And he's like, Oh, Hey James. And he remembered everything. So it was great. It was a great experience. And, but that's just one exam. I gave two examples, like the hedge fund one, I did start a hedge fund and it was a mildly success, not a great, but a mildly successful hedge fund. And I've changed careers completely like five or six times. And I started to think to myself,
Sorry if I'm being long-winded. I apologize if I'm being long-winded. So the idea for the book came about because about six or seven years ago, I was interested in doing stand-up comedy. And I had never done anything like that. I mean, I'm a public speaker, but not a stand-up. I had never been professionally a stand-up comedian. And everyone, of course...
I remember a specific time where someone said to me, James, come on, you can't skip the line. First there's open mics. Then there's the check spot. Then you'd be an MC. Then you go to the lower clubs and the higher clubs and theaters and arenas. And he's like, I've been doing it for 25 years, you know, and I'm still like, you know, getting there. And so that's what I mean. Like he, he couldn't skip the line. And so he was trying to keep me where I was. And I appreciate that. I understand that. And, um,
But he was telling me it. He was giving me this whole thing about why I shouldn't be doing what I was doing 15 seconds before I was supposed to go up on stage, do my first 60 minute show. And I'm like, why? Why couldn't you tell me this afterwards that I was going to suck? And.
And, uh, but look, since, since he told me that two things happen, one is I've traveled all I've toured all over the world now, like right before the lockdowns, I was coming back from the Netherlands where I toured all over the Netherlands. I have gigs coming up in Philadelphia, Omaha, Kansas city, Cleveland, Cincinnati. Um, very exciting lifestyle. I have to admit. And, um,
But but I was also obsessed with how am I going to get better at stand up comedy if all these comedians I know have been doing it for 10 to 20 years? And so I wrote to Anders Ericsson, who's the professor who developed the 10,000 hour rule. And I'm like, what would that 10,000 hour rule is this rule? If you do something for 10,000 hours, you'll be among the best in the world. And and we couldn't figure out.
How would you measure comedy success? Is it the money you make? Is it laughs per minute? What's the metric? And it was kind of none of these things that we kept brainstorming.
and so quickly in every other industry that I've been in. And I realized it was a bunch of techniques that I was quietly doing, but I put names to them and ideas behind them. And I wrote the book of stories, not just about me skipping the line, but about hundreds of others that I've interviewed on my podcast or throughout history. And the one thing I'll mention about the 10,000 hour rule is much more important is what I call the 10,000 experiment rule. But it's really more like a hundred experiments where you're
If you want to learn something fast, have an idea of a unique aspect
aspect of this industry that you want to switch to and start experimenting. And an experiment by its very nature means you're learning things that either you don't know or nobody knows. An experiment usually has a low downside, so you could do many experiments. And it has huge upside. Thomas Edison experimented on 10,000 different wires before he made a light bulb. But then the downside was he had to throw out a wire. The upside was
He made the light bulb and then made General Electric. So he became the equivalent of a billionaire because of experimenting. And it turns out every great success in history comes from people experimenting. And at any given moment, I may have 10 experiments going on in my life because that seems like a lot. But again, they should be easy, cheap to set up, little downside. And if it works, huge, huge upside. And so I realized I learned everything I know
from, in part, this is just one technique in the book, there's 23 different chapters, but in part, I became good in every industry, and not in the top 10 in the world, but maybe in the top 1% by experimenting to have my own unique flavor in this industry. The other thing is, and there's a lot of books about learning, none quite like mine, but
Just because you know something doesn't mean you're going to monetize it. And it's very important to be able to monetize your interests. And so I have a bunch of chapters in the book about monetizing these skills. So you'll be in the top 1% in the world. And then how do you monetize it? Because you need, just because you could even be the number one in the world and make no money at it compared with somebody who has some of the skills for monetizing, like persuasion or understanding what I call the spoken wheel technique or other ideas.
That was a long answer. Yeah, we definitely covered a lot of material there. And there's just like a few things I want to touch on there. The first I noticed is that we tend to like worship or love these stories about people skipping the line. But when you're the person trying to skip the line, it's always, you know, people trying to stop you, which I find this fascinating paradox.
Because like your story of skipping a line and starting this TV pilot for HBO, that's such a cool story. But when you tried to do that, it was that lady from HBO that said no to you. So why do you think like that is that people kind of love these stories, but they hate it when like you are actually the person trying to skip the line? You know, I think it's because they really, they're insecure. I don't want to say they're insecure because it's not always true, but they really don't want you skipping past them.
And they really, they're the ones who can't, anyone who says can't is actually the one who can't do something and they can't go to the CEO's office, which doesn't seem like a big thing. It's walking 300 feet, but it's very scary for some people who maybe they spent 12 years at a company and they used to a certain routine, or maybe it's people who, uh,
They grew up in a household where it's like, look, you can't be anything in life unless you go to college, graduate school, specialize in a medical field, work for a hospital, blah, blah, blah, move up the ladder in a very direct way. So it's very scary for some people, the thought of other people they know skipping the line. I mean, I remember I was kicked out of graduate school for computer science.
And that was fine at first. Like I had a job, so I was making more money than all my grad student friends because I still stayed in the same town. But then I started to realize, oh, they're all going to be skipping me. They're all going to get their PhDs and leave this town and become famous professors or entrepreneurs somewhere. And so I suddenly realized, oh, it's very dangerous if you don't skip the line. You could be have a miserable life. And so
I mentioned earlier how it's important to be passionate about something. And so I've only skipped the line in areas where I'm passionate or even obsessed by. But there's almost a technical reason for that. And that's because when you wake up in the morning, you only have a certain amount of energy to carry you through the day. And
If you spend that energy, you won't be able to accomplish anything. You just go, you have to sleep again to rejuvenate. And so if you don't love doing something, part of the energy, part of sitting down to doing it is using some of your limited amount of energy to convince yourself to sit down and do this thing, this new career. And the people who win,
The reason why they seem to be, to love this, their new passion or the new industry is because
And the reason why they're successful is because they can use all that energy that you're using to just convince yourself Okay, I got to sit down and write another article even though I don't want to be a writer They get to use that energy to actually be a better writer So they're able to spend more energy than you are on being a success Which is why being passionate and finding your passion is very important and I used to say oh, it's not so important like you'll find your passion eventually
But the reality is to be great at something, you need to be passionate about it just for that very technical reason about energy.
Yeah, I totally agree. I remember one summer where I had this idea for like an app and I'm like, okay, I'll teach myself how to code. And it's like I had to spend so much energy just to watch tutorials and whatnot that I was so drained. And meanwhile, like now it's like when it comes to creating content around books or anything, like I find that fun and I can just do that all day. And it's interesting how like when you're doing something you really love, you just have so much more energy to do it and you don't have to like force yourself to like sit down and try to do the work from it.
Yeah, I mean, for instance, take writing as a great example. Writing is a very unnatural activity. Like, it's not like a caveman or a paleo guy, whatever you want to call it now. Maybe caveman is like politically incorrect. I have no idea. But it's not like a guy 40,000 years ago or 2 million years ago would sit at a little table
keyboard for 12 hours at a stretch just typing, that thing wasn't built into our evolution at all except for the fact that we have fingers. But we have fingers for other reasons than typing. And so it's not a very natural activity. You have to love writing if you're going to sit down for that kind of time to write a novel or a book or whatever. Yeah.
Yeah. And so speaking of writing, that's like one of those skills like a lot of people want to learn. And a really important lesson I found in your book is that any skill worth learning is actually a collection of micro skills. Can you kind of just elaborate more on that and like kind of break down why people why you recommend people to learn the micro skills, micro skills instead of the kind of the whole skill at large?
Yeah. So any skill worth learning is actually not a skill. So take business. If someone says, oh, I'm good at business, that really doesn't mean anything. Business is not a skill, but business is a collection of what I call micro skills. So business is the skill of coming up with ideas, the skill of execution, negotiating skills, persuasion skills, marketing skills, sales skills, marketing
leadership skills, management skills, which is different than leadership, skill at selling a company, at skill of valuing a company, skill at raising money. It's this whole collection of micro skills. And by the way, they're all mutually exclusive, meaning just because you're good at raising money doesn't mean you're good at executing the development of a product, or it doesn't mean you're good at selling to a customer. These are all different skills and you need to get good
At not necessarily all of them, you need to be adequate at all of them and you need to be pretty good at a few of those micro skills. But then the intersection of all that will put you in the top one percent of business of the business industry. So as an experiment, I after I wrote the book.
So a backstory. Back in 1997 was the last time I seriously studied chess. And I became a very good chess player. I was a ranked chess master, a very strong chess master. But when you don't study something for 23 years, it's like if you played golf when you were a kid and you don't do it for 20 years, you're not going to be successful.
As good, maybe you were a two handicap before and now you're a 30 handicap. So it's the same thing was happening to me in chess and I was, and I realized, and I was kind of fine with it for a long time, but I decided, you know what, as an experiment, I'm going to simply use the techniques in this book to become a
just as good as I was at my peak at chess, but even better than I ever was at chess. And it's, I've been doing this for about three and a half months. And I would say right now, I'm as good as I was at my peak. I could, I could probably, if I were to play a match with my 1997 self, I could probably break even. Whereas four months ago, I would have lost four out of five games. And, uh,
Uh, my goal is to be better though. I like to, to win my old stuff, beat my old self four out of five games. And I'm just using the techniques in the book. So there's a technique for instance, plus minus equal, which was told to me by, by this technique was told to me by Frank Shamrock. So Frank Shamrock was like a 10 time mixed martial arts champion. And so just in the title mixed martial arts, he had to master, or at least be in the top 1% of the,
Every martial art so you would have to learn these he couldn't spend 10,000 hours on every martial art He had to learn every martial art very quickly So he told me about his favorite technique which was called plus minus equal Which I've since been using pretty heavily when I learned things, but I'm using it specifically now for chess Plus my sequel means this plus you find a coach to teach you all the new stuff equals you find
people who are at your level, who you're rising up with. You're equally excited. You're all about excited the same way and you exchange ideas and help each other. And minus is it sounds bad, but it's not. It's you teach, you find someone who you could teach. And the benefit of teaching is, as Einstein said, if you can't explain something simply, then you don't really understand it. And I find I learned just as much. So I found a coach. I have equals and I'm
I'm giving chess lessons to like two or three different people. And I learned just as much by teaching, perhaps even more in some, some days than by taking lessons because I have to really study the basic concepts in ways that blow my mind compared to how I studied them before. And also just the benefits of having been in so many fields, I'm connecting the dots in what I'm learning now in different ways than I ever did before. So I feel like my understanding of,
chess, and this is just as an example, is much deeper than it ever was before. Deeper actually than my skill set right now. Like my skills are catching up to my understanding because they're two different things. But it's just an interesting thing for me. Like it's working just as I figured it would.
Yeah, I love that lesson in the book. And I think most people would be surprised to find they might think that the minus part is the least important of the equation. But what I found is like when you try to teach someone something, it's like you're really kind of putting your thoughts down into paper into words. And it's really making you think deeply about what you learn. And it's really that teaching process that you kind of get the most out of that people like wouldn't expect, actually. So really enjoy that lesson.
Yeah, like take writing as an example where I've had a plus minus equals over the years. I've been writing for 30 years. And one time I wrote an article about how I like to write. And so it forced me to think so I can explain simply. And I said, after you write an article, a story, a book, whatever, or let's just focus on an article or a blog post as an example. The first thing you should do
is when you're done, take out the first paragraph and the last paragraph, and then read the article over. And you'll see 99 times out of 100, you'll have a much better article because you'll start off in a much more interesting way because it's very hard to start an article. You have to think of some convoluted way. How do I begin this discussion? And then end is usually some like cliche sort of conclusion. But if you take out the last paragraph, you end with a bang. And it actually...
But doing that activity of writing an article about how to write better made me really think, well, why does that work? And I now have used this technique pretty regularly. Whereas I have to admit, before I wrote that article, I didn't necessarily, I had never put a name to that technique. So yes, sometimes I would do it, sometimes I wouldn't. But now I know to at least consider eliminating, and even knowing this rule,
It still works. So even though I write the first paragraph and I know later I'm going to play with taking it out, it's the technique still works. James, I'm smiling because I know exactly what article you're talking about. And I've been following that rule, cutting out the first and last paragraph. And I found it really helpful for my article. So thank you.
Thank you for mentioning that. I appreciate it because it's amazing how you read the article when you take out the first and last paragraph. Sometimes it doesn't work 100% of the time because sometimes there's explanatory stuff in the first paragraph you need. But it's amazing how you start off with such a bang when you start from the second paragraph. Yeah, totally. You kind of just jump into the action.
And so we've been talking about micro skills and another micro skill that I've found like really helpful, like not just reading about, but I've been implementing it as a six minute networking. So can you tell listeners what that is and how they can do that?
Yeah. And first off, this is really good stuff because I mean these questions, because there's kind of a meta way that I put together this book. I have no, I like to think I have no ego in this book. So I, I, a lot of these ideas I learned from other people. And so like I mentioned how plus minus equals I learned from Frank Shamrock and six minute networking was explained to me by Jordan Harbinger. And so I,
I feel like a lot of books, it's like the authors act like this is all my, this came like birthed out of my head, like, cause I'm such a genius. But the reality is to, to get good, everybody's got their own techniques and I learned from the best and, and, and it kind of, by giving people credit for it, it's not like I'm being a nice guy. It's like, I'm showing that
This is authentic. And this is authentic that I want to use this to help you. I'm not taking credit for everything. I'm clearly stating this was done by this person. This was, I have a whole chapter about Nassim Taleb in there. And, uh, uh, so yeah, so Jordan Harbinger told me the six that he's such a great networker and I'm not a good networker. Actually people think I am, and I don't know why they think I am. And somehow I do have a pretty good network, but I have really bad habits of networking, like really, really bad. Like I don't call people back. I don't return emails for months at a time. Um,
And so I'm almost ashamed of my networking skills. So his thing is six minutes a day, go back into your emails from like three months ago or a year ago and just simply return an email and say, Hey, how's it going? I hope all's okay. How's that one project? Uh,
You know, maybe you want to chat some time. You know, things are going OK for me. And that's it. Six minute networking. And you know what's funny? So that Jordan told me that over a year ago, maybe two years ago. And I was talking to Jeff Ilmelt on my podcast yesterday. So Jeff was CEO of GE General Electric for 16 years.
It's probably one of the most famous CEOs in business history. He's really been involved in a lot of aspects. He was a major CEO helping during the financial crisis. He became CEO four days before 9-11. And GE, of course, is one of the most influential companies in the world. So I asked him, what's a key component of success? And he said, remember this, always remember.
Stay in touch with people even when you don't need them. Remember to always just touch base with people even when you don't need them. If every time you talk to someone is when you're in the middle of an emergency and you need their help, they're not gonna help you eventually. They're not gonna like you. And so this is a very important thing for him. And you have to do it sincerely. You have to want to keep in touch with people and so on. But it's so funny how after learning about six-minute networking two years ago and then talking with you today, Jeff Immelt told me yesterday, this is like the key to his success,
And one thing I noticed about him right in the beginning of the conversation, I had never spoken to him before, but he was so friendly and kind.
connecting with me right away. I even asked him, have we ever met before? Do you know me? Because I felt like he was my best friend all of a sudden. He's a very good networker and knows how to do it. So you could see that's his mutant superpower. Everybody's got a mutant superpower and that was his. Right. So James, I just wanted to take a little side note because you are successful. You made millions of dollars. What do you say to the saying, your network is your net worth? Is that true or no?
It's partly true, which is why it's important to do six minute networking. And again, notice, by the way, that's the chapter in the book, but it's not about learning. So the book is called Skip the Line in part because it's about learning to be in the top, very quickly in the top 1% of whatever your passion is, whatever the industry you want to switch to is. But there are chapters like six minute networking that are about how to be good in the business side. And so, yeah.
Yes, your network...
does help you a lot on the net worth side. But learning helps you a lot on the self-worth side. And so it's just as important, these techniques for learning quickly to be in the top 1% of what you're passionate about. Nothing is more pleasurable than being obsessed with something and then mastering it. And the reason is not because you can lord it over everybody, like, oh, I'm the best in the world at this. No, but it's because if you love something and then you get really good at it,
you suddenly see, there's a cliche, the more I know, the more I realize there is much more to know. And you see, like take chess as a very simple domain, as a very simple example. The more I know about chess, the more beautiful a good game seems to me. Like I appreciate the subtleties so much more. Or writing, I appreciate when I see a good writer, I'm like,
ah, I didn't see this before, but now I see why everybody says it's a good writer. Same thing with comedy. There were comedians I was not a fan of 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that now I'm like, ah, now I get it. This is what this person does. And it's because you master something and you appreciate these nuances and then you want to learn those nuances. So again, the more you learn, the more you realize how much there really is to learn. So yeah, learning is in its own
Uh, it's your self-worth increases the more, the more you learn, but networking is, is your network networking, which is related to your persuasion skills and other things, uh, is of course very important is will increase your network. That's the way to monetize your self-worth.
Right. Yeah. And I just found that just even valuable for like your personal life, just reconnecting with old friends and like not asking for anything and just seeing how they're doing. They really appreciate it and it makes you feel good. And, you know, you want to keep those connections because you never know when you might need them. Just like in Jordan's case, when he had to relaunch the podcast and having his network network, like really helped him become one of the most popular business podcasters again after he had to start over from zero. So I think that's an incredible skill.
Oh my God. He has a true skip the liner because it's like he had to start a podcast from scratch and he literally skipped over 2 million podcasts to quickly become one of the top podcasts again. And you know, one of those people he called was me because we'd always just called each other just to keep in touch. And, um,
He knew if he called me, I was probably the first call just because he knew I even put an episode of his podcast on my podcast. And I just did the intro and said, this is Jordan Harbinger's new podcast. Check it out and subscribe to him because he knew I was I would do that for him. And if he had just owned and I know a lot of people who we all know who are in the same space where every time they have a book come out.
They say, hey man, I have a new book out. Can I go on your podcast? And then I have a book out and I write to them and they never even respond. And by the way, I have nothing against them. If you spend your life, there's only so many items you could put in your suitcase. So if every item in my suitcase were all the people I had grudges against,
then I would not be able to, I would have no clothes wherever I travel to. So you always want to keep the positive people close. Everyone say keep your enemies closer or whatever. Nah, the enemies don't have to be so close. Right, right, yeah. They could be further away. Keep your good friends closer to you. Got it.
Yeah, I don't know who came up with this idea that keep your enemies close. That doesn't sound like a fun thing to do. No, it doesn't sound like it.
You know, we only we don't really live a lot of years. So if you say, OK, well, I'll be a doctor until I'm 60. Then I'll have enough money saved and then I'll write a novel. Well, maybe you will. Maybe you won't. But you're only going to have a few years left to enjoy a career as a novelist. Right.
Yeah, and that's what I found so valuable in your book because especially in today's society, people are constantly kind of changing careers and following different passions. And it's an important skill to know how to skip the line and kind of jump ahead. Like you enter a new field and how to get into like the top maybe 5% or 10% quickly. And one of the ways you talk about how to do that is that you could actually borrow from your other skills that you learn. So could you talk kind of about the value of kind of borrowing skills you already know and applying it to a new field? Yeah.
Yeah, and again, I was obsessed with this 10,000-hour rule. And you can read more about the 10,000-hour rule in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers or in Anders Ericsson's
Anderson Erickson's correction of outliers in his book Peak. Or you can listen to Anders on my podcast. And I've known about the 10,000 hour rule forever. I was actually part of the original experiments that Anders did in the early 90s about the 10,000 hour rule because I was a chess master and he did experiments on how many hours it took a chess amateur, chess master, chess grandmaster.
And he did that with violinists, with memory contestants, a whole bunch of domains, but chess was one of them. And so, but I was wondering about this. Like, I remember I was talking to Maria Konnikova, who was a behavioral psychologist, PhD, and she also wrote some books about Sherlock Holmes. And then she wanted from scratch to basically skip line and poker. She started playing poker. And a year later, she had already won like a quarter of a million dollars. And she did a lot of these techniques, you know,
Not like she did it knowing what they were, but she had a plus minus equal. She had, she was breaking up the micro skills and, but I said, were you able to borrow your skills, your hours spent studying Sherlock Holmes or your hours spent studying for a psychology PhD in poker? And she said, absolutely. Like I, she, I, the way I read people, the way I manage risk.
The way I look for clues in what's happening, you know, because to play poker well, you have to put all your opponents, you have to put them on what possible hands could they have. So she picks up on clues like Sherlock might. And and I was thinking about this, like in comedy, like I had spent I kind of had put 10,000 hours into public speaking. I was a public speaker for a very long time. And I was curious if that would help me with comedy.
To be honest, it didn't really. But now that I've put in a lot of hours, like thousands of hours into stand-up comedy, when I do public speaking...
I don't, I don't even need to, it's like unbelievable how much comedy has helped my public speaking. Cause when you think about it, when you really think about it, comedians are the best public speakers. They, they move their body in interesting ways. They do voices, impressions. They do crowd work. They could read the crowd extremely well. If there's 500 people in the crowd, they know exactly the three people who hate them. Like a comedian. Once I was doing a lot of comedy and I've done thousands of shows, um,
I, my public speaking went through the roof. Even after just six months of doing standup comedy, my public speaking was already going through the roof. So I had borrowed hours from my comedy to, um,
to public speaking. Now in games, well, there was one period where I wanted to be a master at Scrabble. So, so using what I learned on the way of becoming a master at chess, I was able to look very quickly, much more quickly than, than most people. I was able to use those same learning techniques to become a master at Scrabble and on and on. I, I, I play almost every game,
I like to think I play every game at that level, but chess is always my first and last love. - Yeah, and it's just so cool to see how you could transfer parts, part of the skills or even most of the skills. I'm sure since you write a lot, you're a good storyteller and you know how to convey emotions and that probably helped you with stand-up comedy too. And just looking at all these areas that you already have experience and then applying it to this new area
that you're entering, and you don't have to start from zero. You're starting from a five or a six instead of starting from the very bottom. So I think that's a pretty cool mindset for people to have. Absolutely, because storytelling and understanding the architecture of what a story is is critical for writing. It's critical for the 10,000 hours in writing. But I'll tell you where it helps the most is not just stand-up comedy, but socializing. So I'm not a very good...
socializer, meaning a, I'm kind of introverted, which doesn't mean I'm shy. I'm not very shy, but it means I, I get energy when I'm by myself and extroverts get energy when they're with people. And I see that like my wife is an extrovert. It's so pleasurable for me to see how happy she is when she's laughing and having fun with a group of her friends and so on. Whereas for me, after two or three, I love my friends, but after two or three hours, I have to like
Step outside the room. I just I need to recoup and regenerate. And it's it's difficult. But and also I'm in a new situation. I recently moved. And so and the people who live where I live, they're very nice, but they're not as.
In New York City, everyone's like career and transaction oriented. In other parts of the world, people just like to relax and enjoy each other. And I'm taking an extreme, but that's roughly how it is. So I'm learning how to socialize with a group of people. I normally had work friends because that's all I've done all my life is like very work intense activities. And
And that's not a bad thing. I had best friends from that. But now I'm trying to be friends with people who I don't really have a lot in common with. So it's all just exchanging stories. And I realized, A, most people should probably drop every other word in their stories. Like that should just be a basic rule of thumb when telling a story. B, I do that. So I'm a good storyteller, which helps me fit in very quickly with other groups. But then I still get burnt out after like a few hours. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, as a fellow introvert, I could definitely relate to that situation.
Yeah, I mean, it's a big balance because I like I love it when my wife is happy and being an extrovert. She could go she could hang out with people for like eight, 12 hours, whatever. And when I first met her, I was so, you know, enraptured that we would hang out that long. But now I realize I really like all our friends. It's just and I really want to spend the time getting to know them. It's just I got to figure out. So so here's a trick I did, which is.
You know, I moved to South Florida. There's a lot of South Americans here. So a lot of our friends are from South America. And so I researched what games, what card games were played in each country. And I got...
online playing some of these car games. And so I would say to some friends, oh, do you play Treco if you're from Argentina or Baraco if you're from Peru? And these are games I became familiar with. And so now I'm able to say, oh, yeah, do you know Baraco? And now friends who I like very much, I'm able to spend eight hours of social time because we could play games, which I'm unnaturally obsessed with. Got it.
And so, James, continuing down this trend of like micro skills, one of the micro skills you're best known for is coming up with 10 ideas a day. And what I love in this book is kind of you dive deeper into that lesson. And you talk about kind of idea addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and a lot of other like strategies to help people come up with those 10 ideas. Can you kind of just talk more about like your 10 ideas a day rule and how you come up with your ideas? Yeah, great. So so
this is a long time ago. I was really depressed. I had lost. I mean, I could tell these stories forever of losing all my money. I've already told one story, but this was another time. It was two, 2001 or 2002. I had lost all my money. It was the first time I had gone totally dead broke since I was a kid. And cause obviously when you're a kid, you're broke. And, uh,
I was so depressed because I built a company, worked so hard at it and, and it was all gone. Like, what did I do all that work for? And I thought I had won the lottery and I would never have that chance again. Cause I was never really that into money or whatever. I thought I was a, I wanted to be a writer. And, um, uh, I was so, so depressed. And then for, for,
For no reason, really. I just like the look of them. I got a box of waiter's pads and I took them to a coffee shop the next day and I would read a little bit and I started writing 10 ideas, like 10 ideas for books, 10 ideas for businesses, 10 ideas for articles, 10 ideas to help another business, 10, who are my 10 best friends, like 10 things I could do to teach my kids or whatever, just all these ideas. And
I noticed a couple things after like a few weeks. It felt like my I didn't feel as depressed anymore Like I was really depressed. I was so depressed. I didn't understand when I saw people smile I didn't understand what muscles are they using like how can I recreate that to make a smile and And then I just felt like my brain was like lighting up like neurons were connecting in ways that they never had before and then I started
I'm sending ideas to people like here's 10 ideas for you to write. Here's 10 businesses you should start. And people will start writing back to me. And that's how I built up an initial network. So like I wrote this guy, Jim Kramer, 10 ideas for articles you should write. No need to get in touch with me. I don't want anything, nothing. And he wrote back. These are ideas are great. Can I hire you to write them? And so that started my monetizing my writing career. I'd been writing for 10 years, but now for the first time I got a, uh,
I framed my first $200 check. I got paid to write an article for Jim Kramer's company, the street.com. And that led to the fight writing for the financial times, the wall street journal writing books. Now I've written 25 books. Uh, so just one email filled with my ideas created like a universe for me. And similarly, uh,
Every time I, I mean, I've sent idea, my idea lists to Google, LinkedIn, Cora, Amazon, Twitter. And I've been invited to speak at each one of these companies. Like again, helping me increase my network, getting me an amazing experience, speaking at these places and meeting people. Like I would beta test Amazon products and stuff. I was a consultant for LinkedIn because of this core. I always had a great relationship and they would treat me very well. Um, you know, LinkedIn, everything. And, um,
It became so valuable, not only from lifting me out of my depression, because we all want to be creative. And here's the thing. The creativity is a muscle. It will atrophy if you don't exercise it like any other muscle. And most people have, because I know this, most people have atrophied creativity muscles, just like most people have atrophied muscles.
biceps because they don't lift weights every day. But creativity is a muscle we can't afford to let atrophy in. And simply writing 10 ideas a day down, they're going to be all shitty ideas by definition. You can't write 10 ideas a day down and have every idea be good. Most ideas are very, very bad. It's just exercise. It's just exercising it. But I talk in one book about idea sex, which is you take
Two completely disparate ideas, and you combine them, and the result, the intersection of that, is usually the best of the intersection. So a very simple example is the Fugees is a rap group in the mid-90s. They took the best disco song from the 70s, the Bee Gees song, Saturday Night Fever or whatever.
And they put a rap beat to it and Lauryn Hill sings to it and Wyclef raps to it and Pross raps to it. And so they have a rap song that's a cover of the best disco song ever. And they were the best rap group at the time. And of course,
Saturday Night Fever done with a rap beat by the Fugees, it instantly became the number one song on the planet. That was almost too easy to predict. But in general, most businesses actually are intersections of ideas. Google
Search engines before Google would, if you search for motorcycles, it would look at every page and see, well, this one has more mentions of motorcycles than that one, so it ranks higher. But there's another idea, which is how do you know which scientific paper had more impact than another scientific paper? Well, how many other papers cite motorcycles?
the first paper and if those papers were important and they cite the other paper, then the first paper is the most important. So Google, Larry Page, took that idea, combined it with the ideas of search engines, and that's the algorithm and the patent for Google, and it created the best search engine on the planet. And you would think, well,
That's good to know, but search engines would have gotten there eventually anyway. No, the search engine business was dead at the time Google became famous. Not a single search engine, Lycos, Excite, Inktomi, the World Wide Web, Worm, Galaxy, EINet, none of these search engines survived.
Because most of those I just said you probably don't even know of. No. AltaVista was the last one. But Google is like, is it? That's by far the best search engine ever. And it's worth a trillion and a half dollars. So...
You know, this idea is important of idea sex. So then in the book, to finally answer your question, maybe I should drop every other word. To finally answer your question, I expanded on this a lot more. There's not just idea sex, there's idea addition, there's idea multiplication, there's idea exponentials. So I'll give you a great example of all these things or some of these things. So Jeff Bezos had this idea.
First, it was firstly an idea, sex idea. Let's take books and combine it with the internet. We're going to make it the first online bookstore. So we made a bookstore and then he's like, well, let's just, we did that and it worked. Let's now multiply it. So we made bookstores. I mean, sorry, he made stores, online stores for clothing, for electronics, for plants, for
uh, you know, for food, which was surprising to everyone that you could sell food online. And, and he went on and on and he created more and more stores. So that's idea, uh,
You could call it idea addition or idea multiplication, whatever. And then there's idea exponentials where you go meta on the idea. So it's like, okay, if I could sell this way and we built this infrastructure for creating new stores, let's now sell this infrastructure to people who want to set up their own stores on Amazon. So that's the whole Amazon sellers business, which is a monologue.
multi $10 billion business now. And then he did more idea exponentials. Let's take Amazon to the power of whatever. And Amazon cubed. And he said, look, we created this infrastructure, which supports enormous logistics and storage. Cause they store all this, you know, million, they have a billion customers. So they store all this data and they have videos, they have
product information. They have tons of, they have this huge cloud infrastructure. So now they took it meta and they sell Amazon web services. Anyone could rent their infrastructure now, which is almost a perfect infrastructure. There's no bugs because it's been tested on their already multi-billion dollar business. And now that's a trillion dollar company using idea exponentials. If they just stayed in an online bookstore, they're
Great. He would have made the best bookstore. He would have sold it for $50 million and moved on to, you know, philanthropy. Instead, now he's the richest man on the planet. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like someone in Amazon HQ has been doing the 10 ideas a day because Amazon just keeps coming up with some crazy and wild ideas. Not all of them work, but you know, the ones that do definitely take off and the company has been doing really well. Well,
Well, and that's, that's by the way, the nature of the beast too. You have to be willing, if you're going to be doing experiments, getting that all the way back to the 10,000 experimental, you have to be willing to fail most of the time. Back to Thomas Edison again, and a reporter asked him, would it feel like to fail 10,000 times in a row? And Thomas Edison was like, sir, I did not fail 10,000 times in a row. I learned 10,000 ways not to make a, how not to make a light bulb.
And so there's no downside to testing ideas. Google is constantly testing ideas. Amazon's constantly testing. And every time they drop a product, people say, oh, well, Google failed again. People don't really understand the real world of success operates in testing.
the foggy and, and almost dangerous world of failure. They, people learn how to navigate rough seas and that's why they get to the destinations they want to go to while all the journalists say Google failed again. Oh yeah. You try and be worth a trillion and a half dollars working as a reporter for the wall street journal or wherever you work. So, and again, not criticizing those reporters. It's just, don't talk about failure without knowing what you're talking about. Hmm.
Yeah, I just love that mindset shift where it's like, oh, if this idea works, great. You know, that's wonderful. And if it doesn't work, it's like, okay, I learned, I learned something. And also I learned how not to do something in the future. So it's really just like a win-win situation. And, you know, you can't really lose with doing all these experiments.
Yeah, I'll give you an example experiment that I did like a year or so ago. You remember when Donald Trump tweeted, I want to buy Greenland? And the prime minister of Denmark tweeted back, it's not for sale. And I'm like, what the hell? Can you buy a country? And what does Denmark have to do with Greenland? And are these two major world leaders
negotiating on Twitter about Greenland? Like what is going on? And so I did my research and I decided to write about what I discovered. But instead of writing a normal article, I decided to do an experiment with my writing because I'm always looking for new formats to write in. You know, like an example format is you write in the first person. Another example format is you write two letters. Two people are sending letters back and forth. That's called the epistolary style. Another style is you could write in the second person. Use you instead of I. But anyway, I wanted to...
experiment with format. And so I created a Kickstarter. I want to raise a hundred million dollars to buy Greenland. And so instead of writing in a blog post, I wrote all the reasons why it's important that I should buy Greenland and why these world leaders are buying Greenland. But then I had to create these awards. You have to create an award structure. So if you donate a hundred dollars, you could, you could become an Earl. If you donate a thousand, you could become a Duke, or I can give you 10,000 acres of land, or you get a holiday named after you in Greenland.
And so I did this whole thing and people started sending money. I think it was got like a thousand dollars and then Kickstarter shut it down. And so what, what happened there? Well, a, it was a really fun way to write an article. Uh, and I saw that it works when you experiment with formats, people respond to the point where they even send money and B, I had never started a Kickstarter before. So I learned all about Kickstarter and, uh,
See, I learned all about Greenland. I knew nothing about Greenland. It's actually a fascinating. Somebody should buy Greenland, actually, for all the reasons I mentioned in this Kickstarter. And and by the way, the experiment failed. Did I buy Kickstarter? No. And but I learned so much and it was I did a whole experiment in a day. It doesn't cost money to do an experiment. I just did it. That's why that's the difference between doing and thinking.
Yeah, yeah. And just for everyone listening, this book is just filled with experiments, some work, some, some didn't, and some are still like in progress. So just really interesting to just hear all these different stories you have in the book. And then towards the end, you have this great chapter about the spoken wheel approach, which is, I think a lot of people, especially content creators, they have trouble like monetizing their ideas or trying to kind of make a living off what they do. Can you dive into like, what is the spoken wheel?
Yeah, of course. So I give an example in the book, which is a very good example, but I'll give a few other examples. I'll give one from my life. So
I was interested in the financial world. I started a hedge fund, but at some point I didn't really enjoy doing the hedge fund anymore. Perhaps after Bernie Madoff rejected investing in my fund and I realized how am I ever gonna compete with someone as great as Bernie Madoff? Because at the time there was nobody better. Not everyone, everyone has said later, oh, I knew he was a scam. Trust me, nobody thought he was a scam at the time. And except for that one guy that nobody paid attention to.
Um, so, so, but what other spokes are there? So the spoken wheel approach is that your love, your passion is in the middle. It's the wheel. And then there's different spokes, how to make money. Like, uh, so hedge fund was one spoke or being maybe a stockbroker is another spoke or being a writer about finance is another spoke writing for a paper, writing books. Those are spokes doing a podcast is another spoke writing a for pay podcast.
subscription newsletter about crypto is another spoke creating a course about investing. I'm going to teach you options investing. That's another spoke. Um, so those are all different spokes for monetizing the same wheel and you could do one spoke or many spokes, but it's a good way. Like, like, you know, I'm in my fifties and let's say I love sports. Well,
And I think to myself, well, that ship has passed. A, I'm not athletic. And B, I'm too old. It's not like I'm going to be a basketball player anytime soon. I'm not going to be a professional at that. But fortunately, with sports at the wheel, many people have created careers using spokes of this wheel. So I know one guy, a
Joe Pompliano, he was a bond trader for JP Morgan. And when the pandemic started, he had a lot of free time. He said to himself, I always loved sports ever since I was a kid. I wasn't necessarily, I didn't necessarily love bond trading, but I, but now he knows a lot about finance. So he did idea sex. What's the interest. So sports is the wheel still, but what's the intersection between sports and finance. And he started a newsletter about very fascinating sports,
that have a finance component. Like, if you watch the Super Bowl, you remember, just a few weeks ago, a singer called The Weeknd, that's his name, The Weeknd, did the halftime show. And I didn't know this, but he was not paid. Not only was he not paid to do the halftime show, he spent $7 million of his own money to produce the show. So in Joe's...
Joe has this newsletter now called huddle up. They started during the pandemic and he wrote about the economics of the halftime. What did Beyonce do during her halftime room five and so on? How did they recoup the money? And he really dives into the financials of the whole thing, but these celebrities are involved in sports. So it's a really great story. And, um,
He now he, he has 27,000 subscribers. He quit his job at JP Morgan. He's making a great living and he's every day. He's doing what he loves. He's writing about sports and finance. And so that was a spoke for him. Another spoke podcast. Another spoke, uh, uh, writing books about, uh,
sports. Another spoke, so a friend of mine, Matt Berry, he was a Hollywood screenwriter. He hated it. And even though it's like a dream job, for anybody else it would be a dream job, for him it was for a while, and then he switched passions, and he wanted to get back to his original love, sports. But he was too old to be an athlete, and everyone said, you can't do this. He got divorced, he really had a restart in life, and he became obsessed with fantasy sports. That was his spoke. And
And so he started writing blog posts for $100 a post. Scott used to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a script, writing for $100 a post. Then he made a kind of electronic fantasy league. So that was another spoke. Let's make a business, an online business that's fantasy sports. And then he started commenting for ESPN on television. And then he became the first fantasy sports anchor for ESPN. It's another spoke.
So through all these spokes, he's become a wealthy person in the sports industry, even though he's the least athletic guy I know, except for myself. So so spokes are a great once you have a passion and you start to get better at it, you think of all the spokes and undoubtedly there are things you can do. And I give I was another chapter called conspiracy numbers, which is how do you evaluate each spoke in terms of your ability to monetize it?
But, you know, it's such a great way to think about making money off your passions. Like I even know chess players in a million years, you would never think of chess as a way to make a million dollars hypothetically. But I know streamers on Twitch now more more hours are watched.
on Twitch of people playing chess than of people playing Fortnite, which was the original reason Twitch started. It was because Fortnite, everybody wanted to watch people playing Fortnite. There's many more hours now of people watching chess players. So chess players who stream, not even the best chess players, not even the second best chess players, chess players who might not even be as good as me are making a living streaming chess. And that's a spoke. There's other spokes as well. But the spoken wheel approach works for anything.
And so James, because this is a podcast on books and you have a whole chapter about books and you talk about Nassim Taleb and his like four books and how they kind of impacted you. I was wondering if you could share like kind of a few of your favorite lessons from his books.
Yeah. And so I, I'm kind of like tongue in cheek in that chapter, in the sense that I say, once you read this chapter, you don't have to buy any of Nassim Taleb's books. Cause I know he gets very like excited on Twitter and I was, I was thinking maybe he would provoke a discussion with him, but true to form, he hasn't noticed me at all. And, uh, uh, but just, I love the titles of his books because each one is a lesson about risk and,
You know, all of these activities, investing, writing, sports, all these activities, we know the rewards are there because that's why people do them. There's a, there's multimillion dollar rewards if you're a success in any of these industries. But so the rewards are there. That's not the hard part. The hard part is keeping the risks low, managing the risks,
Because if you stay in the game, you can win the game. If you manage the risks, you can get better and better and better until you're finally reaping the rewards. Again, the rewards are there. People hardly ever think of risks.
So Nassim Taleb's books are a great way, just the titles alone are a great way to understand risk. So Fooled by Randomness, his first popular book, is this idea that just because someone has a great track record in investing doesn't mean they're a good investor. They might have been lucky. They might have been in a bull market the whole time and they performed poorly.
because they had high volatile stocks like penny stocks in a bull market. And so lo and behold, the market's up 10%, they're up 50% and everyone thinks they're a genius, but they might just have been this a thousand people who are investing. They're the lucky ones who did 50% because they were in a bull market. And so
It just learning that just understanding that's what the title means helps you to understand what was I just lucky or am I good? And it helps you to understand how to manage your own improvements or failures is what's the effect of the environment? What's the effect of luck and so on?
And the black swan, of course, is what you would never expect to happen in probabilistic terms is probably going to happen at some point because life doesn't work like a simple statistical student's curve or whatever. And then anti-fragile is about, look, you don't get better by being persistent. You get better by being what he calls persistent.
Everybody thinks you get better by being resilient. And that's not true. And Nassim's the first one I heard this expression from, anti-fragility, which is that if something hurts you, you have to be anti-fragile. You've got to come back stronger. And
just understanding those concepts. That's, that's all you need to know. Oh, skin in the game. That's so valuable. Like if you have a bet on who's going to win, if you have to make a bet on who's going to win to be president, guaranteed, you're going to research the polls a lot more than all the, uh,
famous political pundits all over my Facebook feed who's like every aunt, cousin, uncle, friend from childhood suddenly became like a political expert spewing their BS opinions about who's going to win. But when you actually bet on it and put skin in the game, even $100 or $10, you will do the research and learn.
And I tried this. I made a bet on Brexit. I don't know anything about Brexit or England. But once I was challenged to make a bet on Brexit, I researched the hell out of that. And I knew what I was talking about with Brexit. Yeah. It's getting in the game. Yeah, yeah. And when I was talking with Morgan Housel, he said, be careful taking advice from someone who's playing like a different game for you. For example, someone's telling you invest in a stock, but they're not invested in it. You might want to be careful of that decision. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Like, and that's why in financial journalism, it's a very tricky issue. Like, should the person talking about a stock be invested in it or not? Because if they're invested in it, they might be biased to ignore the negative. But also if they're invested in it, they're guaranteed they're going to do a lot more research than just the average reporter.
Yeah. And I just think for everyone listening, those are four important books and four important lessons to learn from them. And like you said, if you just kind of understand the title of it, you don't have to read the whole 400, 500 pages. You just kind of need to know the title and you're going to look at life in a completely different way and probably a better way to. Completely different. Yeah.
I call that chapter the Encherto technique because he calls the combination of his books Encherto, which I think means risk in Latin, but I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah, really wonderful books and wonderful lessons in there. And so James, this has been a delightful conversation and I appreciate you talking about Skip the Line today. And for any listeners who want to learn more about you or kind of learn about your work, where's the best place for them to go?
On Amazon and skip the line by skip the line. Or there's also a, there's a TV series called choose yourself, which is about me. And it's based on my book, choose yourself. And that's on Amazon prime, or you can find me on Twitter at J Altucher, or you can find me on Instagram at Altucher, or you can just call me and send me a text message to zero three, five one, two, two one, six, one.
And thanks again, Alex, for once again having me on the show. Any lover of books is a friend of mine, and I'm really grateful to be here. Awesome, James. Well, I really appreciate you coming back on the show. And for everyone listening, thank you for coming on the Reader's Journey podcast with us today. Excellent. Thanks, Alex.
Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Reader's Journey. You can learn more about what's covered in today's podcast in the show notes below. If you enjoyed this podcast, the best way you can support it is by subscribing and leaving a positive review. If you're looking for reading tips or book recommendations, head over to alexandbooks.com. If you want to join my reading journey, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter by searching for Alex and Books.
That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope to see you soon. Read on, everyone.