Ep 134: PJ O’Rourke – Thrown Under the Omnibus!

This week I’ve got something important to say to all of the message boards across the internet: “Everyone wants to save the world, but no one wants to help mom with the dishes.”

Sound familiar? That’s PJ O’Rourke, a world-renowned talking head and published author.

He’s on the show today to talk about politics and why humor is always the best policy–especially if you want to really make a difference.

When it comes to being funny in politics, “you really don’t have a choice,” PJ tells me, “to take it seriously is to indicate you’re an idiot.”

And the same applies to the way you run your business, so be careful! If you take yourself too seriously then you are only going to end up missing out on the important, finer details, because even in business you are still involved in politics one way or the other.

Maybe you’re the member of a committee, maybe you design your staff meetings as a form of democracy – either way, there is an election process, a conversation, and a show of hands that can represent your decision or point of view.

Humor gives you the power to generate conversations, and PJ’s quirky sense of humor lends this week’s show some hilarious viewpoints on these conversation starters:

• The government’s role in regulating capitalism and big business
• The time and place for politics
• How to find humor in high-stakes political situations
• How comedy can change the way the world sees a situation, especially through the lens of the internet

PJ’s latest book, Thrown Under the Omnibus, comes out October 6 and it touches on these themes.

To find out more about PJ and hear more of his work, head over to his column at The Weekly Standard.

Thanks so much for listening!

If you enjoyed this episode of The James Altucher Show, please leave a review or a rating on ITunes. I read every review and it helps to make the podcast better.

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What Are You Saying NO To?

This is what I did to ruin my life.

I had a policy: always say “yes” to opportunity. If you GRAB enough opportunities, I thought, then one would work out and be a winner.

What does “a winner” mean?

It might mean that the goddess, Oprah, would call me.

Or that money would rain down and bless me with its kiss of freedom.

Or that more people that live on this planet (and other nearby Earth-like planets) would love me.

I don’t know what it means. It’s a broken Rubik’s Cube.

Here’s the thing: EVERY time you say “Yes” to one thing you are saying “No” to something else.

This was one policy I had: CNBC would call and say, “Can you come on TV at 5pm today to talk about Apple’s latest products?”

“YES!”

And I’d brush my hair (the once a week brush through) put on a fake suit (jacket and maybe a tie) and go 5 miles uptown to a studio.

Then I’d be nervous. So I’d call my business partner and go over what I was going to say. No matter how many times I did it I was always scared to death.

They would put me in a dark room and a camera would stare at me. I’d say to myself, “I surrender. Let me say the thing that will help the most people.”

Who was I talking to in the dark? Maybe one day I’ll know. I was just scared.

Everyone was scared. About the economy. About their bank accounts. I wanted less people to be scared.

And then I was on for three minutes. And maybe three other people were on with me, so I’d get 45 seconds of speaking time.

Then I’d go home.

When you see someone on TV for 45 seconds it means they probably prepared physically, emotionally, and mentally for a good 3-5 hours, including the time to get home.

I had 100s of those segments carved out of the skinny bones of my life.

Which means I lost my marriage. Which means I spent less time with my children. Which means I spent less time with Claudia when we started seeing each other.

Which means I spent less time on creative efforts. Or other business efforts.

For what? The ego of being on TV maybe. Or maybe I thought exposure like that was good for my business efforts. 45 seconds.

I always said “Yes”.

I always said “no” to Claudia. And to my kids. And to my creativity.

I will never get those 100s of 3-5 hour segments back. And now my kids are not little kids anymore. They are big kids. They do big things. They don’t want me as much.

That was one policy. I had other policies.

I would take speaking gigs where I had to fly, no matter what the money was. I figured: more experience, some money, more connections and the always favorite: “hey, you never know what opportunities this can create”.

The always say “Yes” policy.

5 years later I see my daughter about to turn into an adult. Her eyes look past me and not at me.

I always said “Yes” to a book deal. Maybe it gave me experience writing books. But I look back on the 16 books I’ve written. Maybe 5 are good. The rest….

It was the “always say ‘No”” policy to taking walks with Claudia and relaxing and getting in shape and being happy.

I’m in a train right now, skimming along the banks of the Hudson River and watching the leaves change right before my eyes on the other side.

“Leaves change” is another way of saying a 10000 tiny deaths are happening right in front of me, creating immense beauty.

Well, which is it?

I had a week of meetings and podcasts and other things planned to make use of my time in the city.

I took my daughters last night to a Broadway opening and then put them in a car at midnight last night. “Have a good week!”

I said “Yes” again to bullshit.

Today I packed up, changed all my plans, and got on the train. I watched people kiss in Grand Central. I’m watching the leaves. I’m watching the water.

Now I’m going home to say “Yes” to my children and Claudia. And to me.

—

BE MY GUEST…

The 2015 Casey Research Summit is right around the corner and I wanted you to know that I will be speaking there. If you plan to attend, then NOW is the time to grab your ticket… because its currently 30% off.

Hope to see you there.

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How To Have 1000 Mentors In Your Life

I woke up this morning totally lost. Like every day. “Where am I?” For the smallest of seconds, I’m a stranger in my own body. In my own life.

And then the whole history of life swoops down and I’m like, “ugh!”

The daily search for answers starts. Daily, never ending. Will someone tell me something new?

—

I wanted Prakash to be my mentor.

So I went and offered to take his class notes and turn them into a book. After that I spent time with him every day for months.

I wanted Victor be to my mentor. So I sent him free software for his trading. I sent him everything I had ever worked on. I read every book he ever quoted from. I read papers he wrote in the 1960s and referred to them.

He started me in my hedge fund business.

I wanted Jim to be my mentor. So I read all of his articles and I wrote to him: here are ten articles I wish you would write. And then he said, “how about you write them.”

And I wrote for him for years until he bought a company I started.

I still look for mentors every day.

—

Maybe they wrote something that drove me crazy with delight. That solved problems in my life. Or maybe they created something beautiful. So I wanted to know how they did it.

Susan Cain wrote the book, “Quiet” about unlocking the power of introverts. Her book has been on the bestseller list for the past three years.

Sometimes when I’m in a meeting or a dinner everyone is laughing and talking but I feel a shadow come up inside of me. It starts in my stomach, where the butterflies are.

It then crawls through my heart, gripping it, whispering Shhhh, when the heart protests.

It climbs through my neck, freezing the muscles in my jaw and eventually clamps over my head.

And that’s it. I’m done. I can’t talk for the rest of the night.

So I called Susan Cain. It took months to figure out how to get through.

So I kept pursuing. Finally she came on my podcast. She has a great new company at QuietRev.com where she helps companies bring out the power of their introverted employees.

I wanted to talk about that.

But what I really wanted to talk about was, “What to do when I freeze up like that at an important dinner and meeting.”

She gave me a bunch of suggestions. She said, “You need to be by yourself. So excuse yourself for a little bit when you get that feeling and recharge.”

She said, “Listen to music or comedy beforehand” (Yay!).

She said, “Establish deadlines in advance so everyone knows that you are planning on leaving early.”

She said, “Strike up 1 on 1 bonding with the people around you rather than trying to impress the whole group.”

She said, “Be the first to arrive. So you can claim some mental ownership of the space.”

She said many other things. The entire podcast was, of course, a therapy session for me. I hope she got her objectives as well out of the podcast. I highly recommend her book.

I highly recommend everything she says.

—

The other day I called AJ Jacobs. I told him, let’s talk about that response you made to Ann Coulter on Facebook.

Ann Coulter wrote during the Republican debate, “Just how many f—king jews are there?”

And people were outraged.

AJ responded. He didn’t tell her the number of Jews in the US. He told her exactly that moment, based on basic statistics, how many Jews that moment were having sex.

“I like humor that takes things very literally,” he told me. For instance, all his bestselling books are that style of overly literal humor.

While everyone else was expressing anger and outrage, he won over the world with humor and class. The best way to do things.

People often get angry at others. Outraged! Even people they don’t know. And then they are not at peace.

When you forgive yourself for not being at peace then, guess what! You are at peace.

And then you can be funny and smart and take the coal in your heart and crush it into a diamond.

AJ’s post got 25,000 likes and 10,000 shares on Facebook. Impressive. So we talked about it on a podcast.

But then I asked him what I really wanted to talk to him about. “You give a lot of talks. Sometimes to the same audience. Do they get sick of you saying the same thing?”

I have to give five talks in the next few months. I’m scared about it.

For a brief moment, I needed AJ to be my mentor, even though he just dropped huge knowledge on me with his discussion of literal humor.

And he said, “They don’t even remember. If you change 20% of your material then they will be happy. They might even want to hear the same thing in many cases to remind them.”

Thanks AJ!

—

Sometimes I get tense when I write something that I think people don’t like. Normally I don’t care. But sometimes people actively hate things.

I called Mac Lethal. He’s the fastest rapper in the world. He’s gotten millions of views on his YouTube raps. Like his “pancake rap”. Or his “Mozart rap”. He did his ABCs rap on the Ellen show.

I was fooled by the most basic myth of all, “the overnight success”. I suspected that was the case with Mac Lethal but I was wrong.

We talked about how he’d been practicing for 17 years and developed his own breathing technique so he could make sounds during the inhale and exhale that were the words to his rap. The secret of his speed.

But then I asked him what I wanted to know for myself. How does he handle it when he does something he thought people would like but it turns out they don’t.

He said it was very painful for him until he realized something. “People don’t remember what they don’t like.” And then he went on to create the “mozart rap”. Which now has millions of views.

Thanks Mac!

—

It’s hard to get good at life. I always try to get better but the universe of things I don’t know versus the small things I do know is like 999999999999:1.

I need many mentors. I need a new mentor every day.

Oh! Which brings me to the whole point of this. Damn. I was going to start the article this way.

The most amazing way to get a mentor.

I was talking to John Ruhlin. He did the best thing I ever heard of to get a mentor. Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning, started to tell me the story but I needed to find out directly.

So I picked up the phone, called John, and asked him to describe.

“I knew Cameron Herrold was going to be in town and staying at the Ritz,” he told me.

“I also knew that he liked Brooks Brothers. And that he would probably be too tired to talk to me.”

He continued: so I called his assistant and got all his measurements. I went to Brooks Brothers and bought every shirt, every pair of pants, ties, etc.

I tipped the manager at the Ritz $50 and before Cameron arrived we set up everything in Cameron’s rooms.

Almost like a fashion show inside a hotel room. All the clothes on racks. He could pick whatever he wanted and I would return the rest. It cost me $7000.

After Cameron arrived he came down to meet me for our scheduled meeting. Instead of being tired, he was super excited. He couldn’t believe what I had done for him.

He picked out clothes and paid me back for everything. The guys at the Ritz returned the rest to Brooks Brothers.

So it cost me nothing other than a few hours of time and now I have a mentor for life.

—

There’s no goals. There’s just progress.

Give yourself permission to not be at peace.

Permission brings you closer to peace. For me, every day, I need to give myself permission.

From those first moments after I wake up, when I realize where the pain is inside of me, I realize I have questions I NEED to know.

If the phone rings, please pick up. It might be me. I might be calling you for an answer.

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Financial Fridays: Basic Mistakes Every Entrepreneur Makes

I love you so I don’t want you to do these things. Save the world instead.

A) IGNORING THE “SIX MONTH RULE”

I was on the board of a business where we all got the financials for that month and realized that the company had six months of cash in the bank.

I called the CEO. He said, “no problem. We have six months. I’ll raise money a long time before then and we have some big potential customer deals.”

No you don’t.

You are already out of business if you just have six months cash left.

Raising money takes AT LEAST six months from beginning to end. And that’s if you have a great company.

There’s meeting VCs, pitching, due diligence, legal, and then the final funding, which by itself is around a month.

And new customers take 2 months to find, 2 months to do the work, and 3 months to pay. Best case.

We ended up going into emergency mode. Stopping all development. Hired a bank to sell the company. And the company sold when it had about 3 hours worth of cash left. The CEO left with millions but was three hours from going broke and almost didn’t know it.

QUESTION: Does the 6 months rule apply to artists?

YES!

Yesterday someone said to me: I’m going to quit my job and write. I know I will get published if I can just focus on the writing.

This person will lose.

Nobody is waiting for your magnum opus. And you need money in the bank. And work is often fuel for stories.

Or it gets you motivated. As in: “Ugh, I hate this job so much I better write as good as possible.”

Don’t be a baby. Get six months cash in the bank. That’s the first taste of freedom. Don’t go below that.

B) ENTREPRENEURS SMOKE TOO MUCH CRACK

We have a cognitive bias to think that our shit doesn’t stink.

One time I was starting a business and I realized about halfway through development of the product that I had 5 competitors.

I started to cry. My business partner couldn’t cheer me up. My ex-wife couldn’t cheer me up. My early-morning Scrabble friends couldn’t cheer me up.

My developers in Bangalore cheered me up. “Don’t worry. We’ll just make yours better.”

But every day I had to ask, “am I really making it better? Is this really a feature I would use? Is this feature better than the features on all the other sites?”

We went into feature overload but it was worth it. We sold the business a few months before the market peaked. All of our competitors went out of business.

You have to ask every day, “Am I smoking crack?” Because otherwise your bias is to say, “I have the best business in the world. We can never go out of business.”

QUESTION: Do artists smoke crack?

Of course. We’re all crack smokers all the time.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, told me when he was a loan office that his boss told him,”Never lend money to anyone who says they love what they do.”

The reason: because passion is crack. It blinds you to the faults of your art, your product, your business, your friends, etc.

It’s really hard. Even now I smoke crack. I look at opportunities every day and they all sound so exciting. Crack crack crack. Mmmm!

Run it by someone who doesn’t care about what you do. They can say, “you’re smoking crack” or at least ask the right questions.

C) PARTNERS VEST

Your business partner is your worst enemy.

He’s worse than your competitors because you are more likely to fail because of a partner than a competitor.

Just like marriage.

In my first business, I gave a partner 10% of the business. Then a day later he quit to write a TV show for MTV. I don’t blame him. Heck, I wanted to work for him.

But it was not fun. We had to borrow money to buy him out. It put stress on everyone and I was blamed for inviting him into the company in the first place.

I just had an investment get sold at a low price. The main problem: the partners disagreed.

This happens in every business. It’s hard enough for two people who love each other to stay married. It’s even harder for two people who don’t love each other to work all day together and try to make millions.

Two solutions:

• Everyone should have clear roles. No “co-CEOs”. You do this and I do that. Period.
• Partners who don’t put money in should vest their shares – meaning they get a little bit of their shares over time. Usually four years. If they quit, they only have a small piece of their shares. Or maybe none of their shares.

D) BAD ENTREPRENEURS HIRE PEOPLE

Sometimes you need to hire people.

But triple-question this.

Once you hire them, you can’t fire them.

Are you sure you aren’t hiring them for a task you can do yourself. For instance, you don’t need a secretary to book your plane flights and make restaurant reservations. Do it yourself.

Or sales. The founder should be the sales guy for the first $10 million in revenues.

Don’t hire 5 programmers. Studies show the difference between a good programmer and a bad one is about 10:1.

So hire one great one and pay double what you would pay individually to 5 mediocre programmers.

The success of a business, the success of a relationship, the success of an artistic scene, is going to be determined by the people you surround yourself with.

If someone is not A+, then they are an F. They might later be an A+. But don’t hire at all if your only choices are Fs.

And don’t hire if you don’t have six months cash in the bank to support the hire.

E) BAD ENTREPRENEURS WORRY ABOUT USELESS STUFF

Should you be a C-Corp or an S-Corp?

Who cares.

Should you have a logo and a mission statement?

Who cares.

I don’t think I incorporated my second successful business until the day before we were sold. And I don’t know if we ever had a logo or business cards. I forget.

The only things to worry about: is the product helping people? And do I have more than six months cash in the bank?

And constantly asking yourself if you are smoking crack on the two questions above.

What can go wrong, for instance, that can bring you under six months cash in the bank? Who would you fire then?

These are things worth worrying about.

Because it will force you to keep good relationships with customers to keep the money flowing. And it will force you to constantly know your numbers and test every feature before you spend money on it.

F) BAD ENTREPRENEURS TAKE RISKS

There’s a myth that entrepreneurs are risk takers. This is MBA Crack.

That’s why 85% of entrepreneurs fail. They believed that myth. They were told all of their lives they were “bulldogs” and can survive anything.

Well, making people happy is really hard. Cooking a meal better than the restaurant down the street is really hard. Building a website that people go to more than they go to twitter is really hard.

A friend of mine had a great idea for a business. Protein water. Clear water that had 10 grams of protein in it. High quality protein. Good to drink after workouts. Etc.

Whole Foods started selling it. Things were looking good.

But he never tested if people would actually buy it.

Put an ad up on Facebook. “Clear protein water. 10 grams 0 calories.” If they click, send them to a page describing the benefits and putting them on an email list.

If a lot of people click – you might have a good business. Develop the product.

If nobody clicks. Move on.

My friend went out of business.

Going out of business is not a “learning experience”. It’s really painful. You feel like dying.

It’s the ugliest thing in the world next to the item I’m about to describe.

G) BAD ENTREPRENEURS HAVE SEX WITH EMPLOYEES

Believe it or not, I see this all the time.

A CEO gets, literally, cocky, and starts fooling around with employees. This is death to the business.

I wish I could’ve gotten back my money the second I found out each time a CEO was cheating on his wife (or her husband).

Not that they are so untrustworthy. That’s not the reason. I don’t judge and I don’t know what goes on in people’s lives.

But it just means that they are going to go through a world of personal shit that I don’t want to have to deal with as an investor. It will take their focus off the business.

Save it for after you cash out. You can lose all your money then but I get to keep mine.

H) THEY FORGET THEIR LOYALTIES

Being an entrepreneur largely sucks.

When you’re an employee, you do what your boss says and you help your colleagues and you leave your work in the office at the end of the day.

When you’re an entrepreneur you have to:

• Constantly keep the customers happy. This means responding to emails and comments at 3 in the morning every day.
• Keep employees motivated and creative. This doesn’t mean pep talks. This means, find them work they find meaningful and understanding the particular work-life balance for each employee so they can stay both disciplined and happy.
• Keep shareholders happy. Since they write the emergency checks when you go below your six months.

All of the above are your bosses 24 hours a day. Meanwhile, you’re CEO, Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, and project manager for all projects until you are fully off the ground.

What does “off the ground” mean? It doesn’t mean have six months cash in the bank. That’s just treading water.

It means you have two years of cash in the bank with stable customers.

By the way, does this question apply to artists and writers?

Of course. I write. “Customers” are readers. And I have to work with marketers, designers, researchers, Amazon, other writers, podcasters, speaking channels, mentors, and alternative marketing channels.

This means constant communication. I write in the morning. And then do “business” in the afternoon.

Make a list of all the groups you need to be loyal to. This loyalty is not “here today, gone tomorrow”. These are the groups of people who will catapult you to success. These are the people you will catapult to success.

You need to touch these people in some way each day.

And this is not about 2015. This is how life works for 10,000 years.

I) BAD ENTREPRENEURS PICK FIGHTS

I always ask people about their competitors. You know what the worst answer is? “They suck.”

You know what the best answer is? “Oh yeah, I just had breakfast with the CEO of my biggest competitor.”

You and I, we are here for a long time. We’re all going to grow up in business together.

Sometimes your employees become your competitors. Then they might become your bosses.

They might buy your company after their company is bought. And then they might be your employees again.

We learn and get ideas from each other.

Pixar would learn from Disney how to tell a story. Disney would learn from Pixar how to use technology. Until they merged and Disney’s stock doubled.

PayPal (Peter Thiel) and X.com (Elon Musk) would constantly try to one-up each. Until they merged. Then their biggest competitor (Ebay) bought them.

Now the “paypal mafia” dominates Silicon Valley (see graphic).

Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese pushed each other all through the 70s and 80s. When one did the Godfather, the other would do Taxi Driver. When one did The Cotton Club, the other did the Colour of Money.

Did they hate each other? Of course not. Scorsese even wrote the music for Coppola’s film “The Outsiders” and they teamed up on “New York Stories” (with Woody Allen).

Your competitors are your scene. You will know each other for 50 years. Respect!

The entrepreneurs that I see burn out and disappear are the ones who never built community and friendship around them with their peers.

J) I have a “J” and I wrote about it Monday. It’s Over Promise and Over Deliver. But I have a good story for this one so I’m going to think about it a little more and save it.

—

I’m not the best entrepreneur. And I’m not the worst. But I’ve seen a lot. I’ve started 20 businesses and failed at 17 of them. I’m invested in 30 more. I ran a venture capital firm. I’ve seen a lot of businesses fail. A lot of people cry.

I want people to succeed. Because then there’s that magic moment when you know, “this is it. This is really going to work.”

And that moment feels really good. I see it on people. Their lives change.

I recently watched a business I’m involved in go from $0 in revenues to over $10,000,000 and profitable within 8 months. Now they can plan for the future.

Plan for new products that can help people. And they get thank you letters every day from the people they are already helping.

In many cases, those letters are from competitors because they work together on projects.

And in some cases, the letters are from shareholders asking for help.

Once they are over that first hump, a new set of problems arise. But that’s for another article.

Today I’m going to visit with Susan Cain, author of “Quiet”, to interview her for my podcast.

I’m feeling a bit shy about it. Like, should I be more quiet than she is? Should I look at my feet? Podcasting is part of my business. I want each interview to save lives. That’s how much crack I smoke.

Artist or employee or entrepreneur, ask every night, “Who did I help today”. This will help you avoid the problems above.

And if you fail, please don’t kill yourself. You can try again.

—

Recommended Post: The 100 Rules for Being An Entrepreneur

If you Google “entrepreneur” you get a lot of mindless cliches like “Think Big!” For me, being an “entrepreneur” doesn’t mean starting the next “Facebook”. Or even starting any business at all.

Podcast: Tucker Max – Mate: Become the Man Women Want

Believe it or not, marketing yourself for social relationships is related to marketing your business for success. In fact, from Tucker’s point of view, they’re almost one in the same.

Ask Altucher: The Best Salesman Ever

John Ruhlin joins James and Claudia to talk about what it means to be a great salesman and John has decided to take it to a new level.

 

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Ep 133: Tucker Max – Mate: Become the Man Women Want

Note: Tucker is back and with him comes a small bit of explicit language.

Tucker Max, Nils Parker, and Dr. Jeff Miller are all here to discuss their new book Mate: Become the Man Women Want.

But what does dating have to do with business?

Believe it or not, marketing yourself for social relationships is related to marketing your business for success. In fact, from Tucker’s point of view, they’re almost one in the same. “Dating and sex is [seen as] a battle between men and women, and that’s totally wrong.”

He says, “You want to create win-win relationships,” a relationship where you and your partner(s), whether they be professional or romantic, both come out on top is exactly what you should be seeking.

When Jeff and Tucker met over a steak dinner to discuss Jeff’s recent social and evolutionary psychology talk at a conference, it wasn’t necessarily a romantic meal.

Jeff’s point of view is not trickling down to the young men and women who could truly benefit from his kind of information, and both authors were worried about the perceived misconceptions regarding their work.

“I was appalled at how they misunderstood and misapplied it,” Jeff says of his first book. “I wrote The Mating Mind a long time ago, ’98/’99, and the science has moved on.”

But even with a modern point of view that speaks distinctively with that fratire tone of voice, Tucker Max still experienced the same problem. “I assumed when I wrote the stories that everyone got the subtext,” Tucker says. “[But] the guys didn’t even have a basic foundational set of knowledge about life or about women or about social relationships that they could put my stories into context.”

And this is why a deep understanding of social relationships is nothing but beneficial for your business.

I’m not telling you to marry your job, because it will never satisfy you in a way a romantic relationship ever could. But when you’re networking and looking to build that client base, understanding what makes your brand attractive and utilizing those tools to attract new people is key to your success.

Tucker, Geoffery, and Nils took the initiative to update our knowledge banks and give us these tools, along with a few pieces of eye-catching advice regarding:

• How to adapt yourself and your business to cultural change
• How to seek win-win relationships where cooperation, communication, and coordination reign supreme
• How to network effectively through all of your social relationships in order to increase presence and popularity
• How to recognize and embody the key traits and behaviors both women and clients seek out in romantic and professional relationships

If anything, this book will be the confidence boost you need to initiate new and better sales.

Sell yourself, sell your product, or sell your services by paying attention to the clients (or the woman) in your life.

You’re going to meet new people and you’re going to talk to them, which – in Tucker’s mind – will make you the most popular guy in the room because you’ll be the one having the most fun.

Links and Resources:

• Tucker Max websites (here and here), Twitter and Facebook
• Mate: Become the Man That Women Want
• The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller
• The Mating Grounds podcast
• Dr. Geoffrey Miller
• Nils Parker

Thanks so much for listening!

If you enjoyed this episode of The James Altucher Show, please leave a review or a rating on ITunes. I read every review and it helps to make the podcast better.

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Is Pope Francis An Atheist and Ten Other Things I Learned From Him

My grandparents were disgusted with me when my first, second, and third girlfriends were Catholics.

“What do they cook?” my grandmother asked.

Cooking being the great differentiator in religion. She even said, “Goulash?” Like it was a curse.

Many years later, after a lot of grief, I sat in St. Patrick’s in NYC, praying for money. “please God, make my life better by giving me money”.

It didn’t matter to me that it was a church. I was so scared I didn’t know what to do.

I would do anything, even pray to a god I didn’t believe in, in a house of worship that I didn’t feel welcome in, and asking for something that prayer was never intended for.

Someone asked me yesterday. “what do you feel strongly about?”

I said, “nothing”.

He said “that’s a strong response. Don’t you worry about death?”

I said, “Why waste any part of today worrying about something that will happen later?”

Today Pope Francis arrives at St. Patrick’s in NYC. My guess is his motives will be loftier than mine. But I don’t know. Maybe he wants money also.

So I did some research. God or not, religion or not, Catholic or not, I try to learn from everyone.

Here’s what I love about Pope Francis on this holiest of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur. And I don’t “believe” in the sanctity of either.

A) HE LIVES IN A STUDIO

When Pope Francis traveled to the Vatican for his inauguration he stayed in a hotel that he paid for himself.

And rather than move into the lavish 12-bedroom residence all prior popes live in, he chose a small studio with no staff.

Rather than mimic him, it’s interesting to just ask “why?” and think about it.

What is the example he wants to live by?

B) CUBA

Pope Francis wrote letters to Barack Obama and Raul Castro, encouraging them to get together.

That’s why we now have relations one again with Cuba, after 50 years.

Biologically we’re one species. But politically, for thousands of years we’ve divided up by false and artificial borders.

Imagine a world with no borders. Where trade and innovation flourishes. Where friendship and kindness can transcend ethnic and religious differences.

A world with no more arguing on daytime talk shows.

C) HE TOOK A SELFIE

See the photo. A bunch of teenagers approached him. Asked him for a photo. And they took a selfie.

He doesn’t put himself on a pedestal (he drives a Kia instead of the previous “popemobile”). He wants to show that we all have the potential for direct happiness.

During the time of Jesus, there was no Pope obviously.

In fact, Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you.”

Jesus was speaking to the Jewish layman of the time. But now he might even say, “the choice for freedom is within you, and not anyone else.”

And that’s why the Pope takes a selfie.

Quote from him: “Depicting the Pope as a sort of Superman, a star, is OFFENSIVE to me. The pope is a man who laughs, cries, sleeps calmly and has friends like everyone else. A normal person.”

D) HE MAKES PHONE CALLS

Two years ago, a young woman was pressured by her husband to have an abortion. She said, “no”, and got divorced.

She was depressed. She wrote the Pope.

A few weeks later the phone rang. She picked it up.

“Hello,” the other side said, “it’s Pope Francis.” He comforted her and then baptized the newborn when it was born.

He regularly makes calls to the people who write him, shedding the layers of bureaucracy that have existed for almost 2000 years in the Vatican.

How often we forget the immense benefits a simple touch makes.

The most impressive display of beauty is not the Sistine Chapel, with God reaching to grasp the first man… but a man reaching out to touch a single woman who needed help.

How many of us do that simple act, the creation of art and beauty, every day? I don’t. But I should.

D) HE HATES THE NEWS

“The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, but that’s normal, because a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.”

The media sells subscriptions. But every day we have a choice. To focus on what is growing in our lives, or the negativity and fear that try to bring us down.

Another quote: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

E) THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF MAN

There are something like 8 million species on Earth. We always think of ourselves as somehow “king” of the food chain.

Maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. After all, we made the definition of the phrase “food chain” so why not make ourselves king of it.

Certainly many species are not even aware of us.

Nor is it so great that we are supposedly, “intelligent”. How many high IQ people are truly happy and free and live every day with well-being.

Francis’ quote: “No one can grow if he does not accept his smallness.”

F) HE TEACHES PEOPLE TO CHOOSE THEMSELVES

We know that happiness is not related to money. Countless studies have shown this.

Often it’s related to our mindset. To the choices we make. Again, when someone asked me why not worry about tomorrow, there is no real answer. Why should I?

Francis quote: “This is the struggle of every person: be free or be a slave.”

Even if you are stuck at the bottom of solitary confinement in jail, you can still choose to be free inside your spirit.

This is not self-help BS. This is your choice: do you be miserable or do you root yourself in your inner freedom? Why choose to be miserable?

And yet, often when I wake up in the morning, all my past memories suck me in as quickly as possible and it’s an effort not to say “ugh”.

Then I’m a slave again. It’s a practice every day to choose freedom.

G) HE SECRETLY READS MY EMAILS

His quote: “Living together is an art. It’s a patient art, it’s a beautiful art, it’s fascinating.”

How does he know that Claudia and I recently had a horrible argument.

It was so painful. I couldn’t even function for days. We don’t argue a lot and when we do I feel like my heart bursts open.

Do you ever feel like that? Like you argue with someone and the only way out of it is to crawl into a cave. To disappear and not even think until the storm seems to pass.

But it does pass. And you figure your way through the maze to find a greater intimacy.

I don’t brag about it. I hate arguing. I don’t ever want to. I’d honestly rather have less intimacy in my life than argue to find greater intimacy.

But when it’s there I do feel like we just made a work of art.

H) HE DOESN’T TEACH FEAR

For all I know he is an atheist. I can’t find one quote from him about hell or damnation.

In my view (and I may be wrong, it doesn’t matter to me) he uses the word “god” as a placeholder for “well-being”.

Many studies show that the key to contentment and confidence is three things:

• Growing competence in a pursuit you love
• Strengthening every day the relationships around you
• Increasing your freedom of choices

Quote from the Pope: “If we start without confidence, Already we have lost half the battle and we bury our talents.”

I) HE THINKS LIKE THE DALAI LAMA

A friend of mine who is a believer in Tibetan Buddhism and has spent much time with the Dalai Lama once told me this: “when you are with the Dalai Lama you feel as if he loves you the way a mother loves her baby.”

Quote from Francis: “To protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope.

It is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds; it is to bring the warmth of hope!”

J) LIVE BY EXAMPLE INSTEAD OF PREACHING

Imagine you’ve had a hard day at your construction site. You finally get a break, sit down with your friends, and break out your lunch.

A man walks by. He’s tired also from his job. He leaves the crowd surrounding him and asks you and your friends if he can join you for lunch.

He pulls out his lunchbox also and starts eating and talking to you.

He lives in a simple studio, drives a simple car, and refuses all gifts anyone gives him.

He’s the Pope and this happened.

Quote: “These two criteria are like the pillars of true love: deeds, and the gift of self.”

He doesn’t just say it. He lives it.

It doesn’t matter if you are Jewish on the holiest day of the year. It doesn’t matter if you are an atheist. It doesn’t matter if you are Christian, or Catholic.

Pope Francis lives a message. I wish every day I could try to live closer to that same message.

K) HIS NAME IS HIS ENTIRE BELIEF SYSTEM

He chose the name Francis when he became Pope because of Francis of Assisi. How come?

He explains:

“Francis of Assisi loved, helped and served the needy, the sick and the poor; he also cared greatly for creation.”

To me, this is the entire belief system of Pope Francis. He did not use the words “god” or “jesus” or “spirit” above.

This is all anyone needs to transform a life of fear and stress and anxiety and regret into a life of well-being and happiness.

Sometimes I think I’m not a good person. Sometimes I look at people on the street and hate them for no reason. Sometimes I’m not as good as I could be to family or friends.

But I’m trying to be better. I hope every day I can wake up and remind myself of Francis’s exact words above.

“To care greatly for creation” is the essence of choosing yourself instead of letting anyone else do it for you.

Instead of being held back by judgments or anger or fear or regret.

Maybe one day I will be able to live in a studio, call people who need help, eat lunch with strangers, take selfies with whoever.

For now, I write blog posts. And maybe tomorrow I’ll die.

—

More From James Altucher:

Recommended Post: 20 Ways To Restore Faith When Everything Goes Wrong

Sometimes I wish the mother ship would land and take me home. I look in the sky. Where is the ship, with the beautiful aliens. The ones I belong with. Why did they leave me here on this pathetic planet. Did they really want me to grow old and die here?

Podcast: John McAfee– The Most Interesting Man in the Universe

How do you summarize a highly colorful life of an inventor, billionaire and philanthropist?

Ask Altucher: Ep 360 Jason Zook (aka Surfrapp) Sells His Future

Of all the assets that you could possibly sell, I bet you’ve never thought of selling your future . . . but Jason Zook is doing just that.

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Six People You Must Find Today

The aliens have a mission for you.

Six people out of seven billion people were sent from deep space on a mission to Earth.

Each of these people contains a part of a hidden message encoded in their DNA.

You have twenty four hours to find all six people, reach into their DNA to get the message, line the pieces up to put the message together, use your Captain Crunch decoder ring to decode the message.

GAH

Once you do this, oxytocin will explode through your body, lighting up all of your pleasure centers.

If you don’t do this in twenty four hours the world will be obliterated. The aliens will come. The good aliens are long dead.

They moved on to another dimension because of superior technology that we can’t understand.

The only things they left behind were you and the six people around the world out of seven billion that you must find. Please find them today.

For the sake of all humanity, PLEASE! Write their names in a notebook. Preferably a waiter’s pad.

Then do it again tomorrow.

Here’s my promise: your life will be 100% different in six months if you do this.

This is your mission. You were chosen to find these people.

I wish I could help you. But I have my own mission today.

The six people you need to find:

1) SOMEONE TO LOVE. Write the name and why you love this person.

2) SOMEONE TO THANK. You must call them and thank them. If you can’t call them, just write their name down.

3) SOMEONE TO BE GRATEFUL FOR: (but you can’t thank directly. Maybe they are dead. Or long gone from your life.)

4) SOMEONE TO FORGIVE: (you don’t have to physically forgive them. It turns out the same amount of oxytocin is released if you write their name down on a piece of paper and forgive them).

5) SOMEONE TO FORGET: (no need to be angry anymore, my sweet baby. Forgetting and moving on, even if their actions were unforgivable).

6) SOMEONE TO ADMIRE: We can often rewire the brain by thinking about the people we want to admire and emulate.

Oxytocin will get released. Enough to re-energize your DNA. To send electric signals that will destroy the bad alien battleships that will arrive on Earth in 24 hours.

You have to repeat tomorrow. Else all is lost.

Godspeed!

There! Claudia, I just proved I can do a short post.

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Financial Fridays: Divorce Sucks. A How-To

I never write about my ex-wife. It’s her life.

But I want to write about divorce because the entire thing is a scam.

By the way, let’s discuss marriage for a second.

I am married to Claudia. I love her and wanted to be with her.

But let’s face it: we got married because I am insecure and felt that the government blessing our marriage would make her love me more.

This is not true. She loves me (I hope) but not more or less because the government told her to.

As far as I can tell, the only real legal benefit of marriage is that you can share medical insurance if you have a regular 9-5 job.

Everything else (estate planning, kids expenses) can be done legally, piece by piece, and much more efficiently and kindly.

Lifespans are long and kids, sadly, grow up, and no longer need you in the same way.

They no longer wake up in the middle of the night calling your name and in tears. Their nightmares are different.

So divorce happens. Because this government mandated false commitment has a way of withering. A dead leaf on a tree. Falling to the ground in an extra chilly winter.

When I was getting a divorce, I first went to a lawyer.

“This is the one you have to use,” said my friend. She had used her.

Just for walking in the door, the lawyer wanted $10,000. I didn’t want to give it to her.

She explained to me what would happen. I hire her. Then my ex-wife hires a lawyer (another $10,000). Then official letters are sent. Then negotiations between the lawyers happen.

Lots of negotiations: kids, estate, money, assets, house, etc. Anger flares. Then court. Then judges.

Forget it, I said.

I didn’t hire her. My ex didn’t hire a lawyer. Probably $100,000+ saved.

We decided what we wanted to do about the kids. We live in the same town so it’s easy.

EVERYTHING ELSE: we did this.

We put all of our assets in a corporation co-owned by us 50-50.

Then, asset-free, we made a one page divorce agreement. THEN we showed it to a lawyer who approved it and drove it through the court system.
Because it was so unusual it had trouble getting through the court system.

We got legally divorced. Emotionally, we were divorced. But we were still financially tied together.

But at that point we had the leisure of figuring that part out.

Which we did when emotions were less strong and we ultimately dissolved the corporation and everything was fair.

Total cost of divorce: $1000. Total time (from agreement to judge approval): about six months.

Did everything work out great? I don’t know. But it was probably better than two strangers ripping us apart and charging every minute for it.

Some things to keep in mind:

Kids are the only thing that’s important.

Throughout life, feelings and emotions go high and low. People change. Bad and good stories happen.

Marriage is a story. Divorce is a story.

But kids are not a story. They are an assignment. Love them and care for them and set an example so they become good adults.

Adults who remember to play like kids, but have experience that leads to wisdom.

When we first told the kids we were getting a divorce they cried.

They didn’t cry for us. They cried because they didn’t want to be “one of those kids”. Whatever image they had of “those kids” meant.

So our first goal was to make this smooth for them.

When you think of divorce, you think money and court battles. We decided to remove that from the equation by separating out the money.

We got our legal divorce quickly so everyone could just move on with their lives.

Then over the next two years, we figured out the financial situation in a much more calm environment. That was also a one page agreement with no lawyers needed.

I would definitely consult an accountant to make sure you set up the right structure to hold financial assets.

No situation is perfect. No relationship is perfect. But no matter what terrible things happen in a marriage (and terrible things always happen), they didn’t happen to your kids.

Some things I deeply miss because we are not together as much. I miss the “Daddy!” and the hugs when I come home from work.

And now they are teenagers and that part of their life is over.

Now I’ve been given the assignment to help make them into good adults so they can continue to destroy the world like I’ve been doing.

I only hope I am doing a good job.

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Learning to Fly

A friend of mine is in jail. Again.

I’m going to go visit him. I don’t know the full story yet. I know he’s very upset.

At me. Which is unfortunate. In court, when they sentenced him, he called jail “Club Fed” and I wrote about it so they showed the judge the article.

The judge said, “Well, you’re not going to ‘Club Fed’ this time.” And now he’s gone for a long time. Maybe until death.

And I don’t think he did what they are accusing him of.

The other four guys trying to kill the other guy did.

I think my friend did what he usually does: he didn’t turn anyone in. So they gave him the same sentence.

That’s what they do. If it were me, I would’ve turned them in. But he doesn’t do that.

Ok. I will visit him.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. I was thinking of jail because one of my of the readers of this blog ever since the beginning disappeared for awhile.

When he got back he told me he had just gotten out of jail. I almost fell on the floor. He was a yoga guy, healthy, always commenting on my posts. Always super positive.

What happened?

I was stealing art, he told me. And he told me the story.

It was painful and he did something that many people might have been tempted to do and he got caught and had to go to jail.

He asked me the other day, “how did it affect you, hearing what happened to me.”

A) I got scared. Because bad things can happen to good people.

B) We don’t live as an average. Often we live in extremes.

What does this mean? It means: on average, I’m a good, honest, ethical person.

But at extremes, most of us can be anything. Hopefully the extremes aren’t too extreme. And hopefully they only last a few moments. Which is why they are called extremes.

But EXTREME + BAD SITUATION = LIFE-RUINING (or CHANGING) EXPERIENCE.

C) Failure is not always good.

I would never want to go to jail. Everyone I’ve ever met who has been to jail says they have learned from the experience.

Not me. I’d get lonely, insecure, scared. I think. I don’t know.

We live in the era of “failure porn” right now.

“Failure is good,” says all the entre-porners. If you don’t fail, you won’t learn from your mistakes. These are quotes from people who have never failed.

When you’re scared how you’re going to get diapers for your four month old, that doesn’t feel like, “WOW! I’m going to learn something from this.”

It feels like vomit is coming out of every pore of your body.

It feels like the inside of your head has a monster that is scratching to get out and be unleashed on the world.

It feels like fear.

D) Pride.

I’m happy my friend served his time. Exercised. Read. Did all the good things you’re supposed to do, and did come out the other side more optimistic than ever.

Now he’s writing a book about his experience which is why he asked me what I felt when I heard his story.

So I’m grateful I have a friend who turned shit into fertilizer.

And to be honest, I’m grateful he attributes some of his ability to survive the experience to things he was reading by me while he was in jail.

Which is why I told Freeway Ricky Ross, the billion dollar drug dealer who now gives talks at prisons, I’ll donate as many books of “Choose Yourself” he needs to any prison he ever talks to for the rest of his life.

E) There but for the grace of god.

I don’t know why I feel this. I’ve never even remotely come close to doing anything against the law.

But life can be lived at the extremes. And I know that when you break out of the routine of death, things happen.

The routine of death is what takes over when life ends.

Life is when we’re all unique children. We haven’t been taught how to be an adult. An adult is when we’re all taught to be the same, to talk the same, to act the same, to live by the same routines.

The routine of death is what many people call “their daily routine”.

Once you leave the routine of death, lots of things can happen. You won’t be sitting in the average any more. You’ll get closer and closer to the extremes.

I’ve been at extremes. Both good and bad. You can’t have one without the other.

An extreme creates a story. And when you are back to “average” you can tell the story. But first you have to live it.

There but for the grace of god go I, because I have lots of stories.

F) Relief.

My friend made it out the other side. Maybe I said it before above (why re-read, why re-write my “gut impressions”). But I’m relieved he is free.

Free in body because he is out of jail. Free in spirit because the only thing that is important to him now is what he does today.

Is he healthy today. Is he around emotionally healthy people. Is he creative. Is he grateful. Every day.

I asked him.

Yes, he said.

Every day? 1% improvement very single day.

Yes, he said.

Yes, I am.

And he knows the real secret now. Once you are free, you can fly.

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Ice Cube Explains Art In One Line

I had to physically force Claudia to go see “Straight Outta Compton”. And there were a lot of sex scenes but I didn’t care. I took my 13 year old and 16 year old daughters.

Even in a couples therapy session, Claudia said to the Doctor, “He keeps insisting I see this. I don’t want to!”

But finally everyone agreed at the same time and I jumped on it. “Everyone in the car!”

I’m not going to talk about the movie. Whatever. Everyone else is talking about it. Yeah, there are scenes. Yeah, they missed stuff.

But after it finished, we kept sitting and then they had end shots of the real guys.

Ice Cube says one line, “IF IT’S NOT HARD IT’S SOFT“.

That is art. That is business. That is the way I need to live my life.

If a piece of writing is not hard, it’s weak. It’s not worth writing. It’s not worth sharing.

If it’s not hard it’s soft.

If you can’t BLEED or KILL or SLASH YOUR GUTS with your word, then keep it to yourself.

If you can’t take it to the edge, then you played it to safe. Every time.

Don’t just gossip or talk to say words. Say words that are your reality, that are your pain, that expresses yourself.

If you can’t change the world, then you know you have to change yourself.

Mostly, for me, if I can’t say something that has really hurt me, or helped me, or changed me in some way, then I need to just shut up. I need to not write it.

Find a pain inside of you. Tease it out. This is hard. This is art.

If it’s not so hot you feel like it brands you, then it’s cold and you’re nothing.

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Ep 132: John McAfee – The Most Interesting Man in the Universe

How do you summarize a highly colorful life of an inventor, billionaire and philanthropist?

In this episode of The James Altucher Show, our guest is John McAfee. James and John talk about the high and low points of John’s life.

Just days after this interview, John announced he is running for President of the United States.

He is probably best known for McAfee antivirus software, which he created while working as a programmer for Lockheed Martin.

Even with extraordinary success, John never measured his self-worth with his net-worth. Rather, he saved more than $30 million since he began McAfee. After a time, he turned the reins of of his successful antivirus company to Bill Larson, former VP of IBM.

John has had a controversial career. He’s spent his life on the run, has admitted to using and selling illegal drugs and has been arrested for illegal possession of firearms in the U.S.

Despite this, he still remains ever-relevant decades later. He is still the most influential authority on information security in the world and a widely sought speaker on that topic. So it did not come as a surprise that just recently he’s come under fire for writing about the real culprit behind the Ashley Madison data brouhaha.

Episode highlights:

How he created the McAfee antivirus out of curiosity, never expecting it take off.

His unhappiness with the administrative aspect of running an enterprise and why he stopped running the company.

His life on the run, after experiencing threat and extortion from the government of Belize.

Reinventing his business and reorganizing his life after losing all his money when forced to leave Belize.

Talking about his natural antibiotics venture in Quorum sensing. His foray into biohacking is touted to be 15 years advanced in terms of research.

Problems confronting the Internet landscape nowadays, the loss of privacy and what he does to stop it.

Being rich and famous never bothered John McAfee, he stays true to himself and does what he knows best: being unreasonable even if the world doesn’t agree with his opinions.

And there was the matter of losing all of his money and investments, hiding like a fugitive and finally getting extradited to the U.S. Also not a problem; John just continued to find ways to start another internet-security firm called Future Tense Central, the technology of which is leaning toward consumer mobile-device apps, company privacy, and security-sharing software.

His purpose nowadays is more focused on preventing the loss of privacy and warning against the evil of using gadgets, downloading convenience apps and storing information on the cloud because there are ways to ‘spy’ and fish for personal information.

Links and References Mentioned in this show:

Ashley Madison write-up

Future Tense Central: his security firm after Belize

D-Vasive: a mobile-privacy app he devised for anti-spying

Spy TV Series

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I Love Penn Jillette

I like Penn Jillette because he went to clown college.

My parents wanted me to go to a school where I could get a job as a lawyer and a businessman and a doctor and make money and learn “normal” things.

While Penn was learning to juggle, to do magic, to walk a tightwire, and to do all clown things.

I wish Penn’s parents had been my parents.

I like that Penn not only does magic but he tells people how he does the magic.

It’s that rule we all hear as a kid. We all repeat it as a joke at least once in our lives.

Like you kiss someone a certain way and they look at you and say, “HOW did you do that?”

“A magician never reveals his secrets.” And then you go back to kissing.

Penn tells all his secrets. Right there on the stage.

And then guess what? Then he does the same trick again and even though you KNOW how he does it, you still can’t figure out how he does that.

That’s magic. I like Penn because he’s a magician who reveals his secrets.

I like Penn because he hides nothing. Read his two books. Everything he should ever be embarrassed about is there.

But he’s not embarrassed. He wrote them in his books. I like that.

I like Penn because he one time took six years to master a three minute trick. That is the essence of mastery.

I hope I have that patience in life.

I like Penn because he lives in a different universe than everyone else. And he is the ruler of that universe.

I like Penn because he helps me be creative. He tries to understand the difference between perfecting the same act over and over again for years and coming up with a new act for the audience. I need to learn more of that.

I like Penn because he is astonished at his success. “I didn’t need much,” he said. “And then I never needed again.”

NOT NEEDING MUCH + DOING WHAT YOU LOVE = YOU GET TO DO IT FOREVER

I like Penn because he wanted to talk to me.

I tried to get Penn on my podcast. At first there were all sorts of terms. I said, “no way. I can’t beg to have someone on my podcast.”

The intermediary, who may or may not have spoken to Penn, said “please”.

I’m a sucker for “please”. I said “ok”.

And then Penn and I (I like that I can say “Penn and I”) broke all the terms anyway.

We were having a fun time. Well…I was having a fun time and he kept talking to me.

In the graphic is some of what we talked about. In my podcast from last week is the rest.

I like Penn because he makes people happy and makes people laugh and also tries to bring truth to the world and expose the frauds.

He’s like a superhero and he actually has super powers.

I like Penn because I’m going to meet him in person in a few weeks when we both speak at a conference.

I’m already scared because what can I say that would possibly match what he says.

I like Penn because I like to expose the frauds in life. The ones who try to fool people so they can make more money. The scams.

I like Penn because he’s a child in the body of 6’7″ 56 year old man.

I love Penn because I want to be just like him when I grow up.

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The Ten Most Important Books To Expand Your Brain

Books suck. No question about it, almost everyone who writes a book is a crappy writer.

And this is a good thing.

It’s because the writer spent his life getting GOOD at what he was writing about. He didn’t spend his life being good at writing.

He didn’t spend his life typing. He ran a country. Or built a robot. Or discovered DNA or walked between the twin towers.

He or She DID something. Something that changed lives. Something that went from his or her head out into the real world.

But that’s ok. There are a few good books out there.

I like reading billion-person books. Books, that if read widely, would change a billion lives.

I like reading books where I feel my brain have an IQ orgasm. Like, I literally feel my IQ go up while reading the book.

And, (please let me stick with this metaphor one more sentence), I might have a little brain-child that turns into my own special idea or book after reading a great book.

Before I give my list, I want to mention there are three kinds of non-fiction books: (and I’m only dealing with non-fiction. Fiction is another category).

– BUSINESS CARD BOOKS:

These are books like “How to be a leader”.

They establish the author as an expert. The author then uses this book to get speaking gigs or coaching or consulting gigs.

These books usually suck. Don’t read one. But nothing wrong with writing one.

In fact, writing one might be desperately important to your career.

– BOOKS THAT SHOULD BE CHAPTERS:

A publisher will see an article somewhere like, “12 ways to become smarter” and say, “that should be a book”.

Then the writer mistakenly says, “ok” and he has to undergo the agony of changing something that was a perfectly good 2000 word article into a 60,000 word book.

Those books suck. Don’t read one. And DEFINITELY don’t write one. Unless you want to waste a year of your life. I wasted 2004-2009 doing that.

– BRAINGASM BOOKS:

Here’s my top 10 list of braingasm books. Books that will raise your IQ between the time you start and the time you end.

By the way, there are more than 10 of these books. This is just my TOP 10. Although not really in that order. It’s hard for a small mind like mine to order these.

[Note: I KNOW, Jeff, that I have a monthly book club. Don’t yell at me!

But this is separate. That’s 10 books A MONTH.

This is my top 10 of ALL TIME, although it might change. In fact, I know it’s going to change tomorrow. I’m reading a good book right now.

Sometimes it changes everyday.].

THE BOOKS:

(1) “MASTERY” by Robert Greene

This book is like a curated version of 1000 biographies all under the guise, “how to become a master at what you love”.

(2) “BOLD” by Peter Diamondis and Steven Kotler

Basically if you want to know the future, read this.

Supplement it with “Abundance” by the same two and “Tomorrowland” by Steven Kotler” and even “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley.

I feel “Abundance” is like a sequel to “The Rational Optimist”. So I’m giving you four books with one recommendation.

(3) “OUTLIERS” by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell is not the first person to come up with the 10,000 hour rule. Nor is he the first person to document what it takes to become the best in the world at something.

But his stories are so great as he explains these deep concepts.

How did the Beatles become the best? Why are professional hockey players born in January, February and March?

And so on.

(4) “WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM” by Steven Johnson

Also add to this: “How We Got to Now” by Steven Johnson.

Basically: don’t believe the myth of the lonely genius.

Ideas come from a confluence of history, “the adjacent possible” specific geographic locations, etc.

The connections Johnson makes are brilliant. For instance, The Gutenberg Press (which, in itself, was invented because of improvements in sewing looms), made everyone realize they had bad vision.

So the science of lenses was created. So microscopes were eventually created. So germs were eventually discovered. So modern medical science was discovered.

And so on. Johnson is a thinker and a linker and tells a good story.

(5) “MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING” by Victor Frankl

I’m at a loss for words here. Just read it.

Don’t read it for the Holocaust. Or psychological theory.

Read it because when you’re about halfway through you will realize your life is no longer the same.

And next time you get a chance to whisper in the ear of someone about to kill himself, whisper words from this book.

(6) “BORN STANDING UP” by Steve Martin

And while you are at it, throw in “Bounce” by Mathew Syed, who was the UK Ping Pong champion when he was younger.

I love any book where someone took their passion, documented it, and shared it with us. That’s when you can see the subleties, the hard work, the luck, the talent, the skill, all come together to form a champion.

Heck, throw in, “An Astronaut’s Guide to Earth” by Commander Chris Hadfield.

(7) “ZERO TO ONE” by Peter Thiel

There’s a lot of business books out there. 99% of them are BS. Read this one.

So many concepts really changed my attitude about not only business but capitalism.

Thiel, the founder of PayPal, and first investor in Facebook, is brilliant in how he simply shares his theories on building a billion dollar business.

I love his story on my podcast what exactly happened in the room when a 24 year old Mark Zuckerberg was offered $250,000,000 and refused it in two minutes.

(8) “QUIET” by Susan Cain

Probably half the world is introverts.

Maybe more. It’s not an easy life to live.

I sometimes have that feeling in a room full of people, “uh-oh. I just shut down. I can’t talk anymore and there’s a lock on my mouth and this crowd threw away the key.”

Do you ever get that feeling? Please? I hope you do. Let’s try to lock eyes at the party.

“Quiet” shows the reader how to unlock the secret powers that probably half the world needs to unlock.

And, please Susan Cain come on my podcast.

(9) “ANTIFRAGILE” by Nassim Taleb

And throw in “The Black Swan” and “Fooled by Randomness”.

“Fragile” means if you hit something might break.

“Resilient” means if you hit something, it will stay the same.

On my podcast Nassim discusses “Antifragility” – building a system, even on that works for you on a personal level, where you if you harm your self in some way it becomes stronger.

That podcast changed my life

He discusses Antifragility throughout history, up to our current economic situation, and even in our personal situations.

(10) “MINDSET” by Carol Dweck

Again, I am fascinated by the field of mastery.

Not self-improvement (eat well, sleep well, etc) but on how can you continue a path of improvement so that you can really enjoy the subtleties at a very deep level of whatever it is you love.

Carol Dweck, through massive research and storytelling, shows the reader how to continue on the path of improvement and why so many people fall off that path.

—

These are not books I’m picking so I can look smart. These are books that I’ve read that have made me smarter.

—

My latest book, THE RICH EMPLOYEE, is now out in Amazon. This book gives you the tools to find  satisfaction, meaning, and true wealth as a rich employee.

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The One Formula To Find Your Passion In Life

I was passionate when I was throwing hard pointed rocks at other little kids.

“I hit him!”

My friends and I would climb around construction sites, pretending they were forts. And throw rocks at each other until we were caught by parents. By adults.

Fun!

Einstein found his passion because he wondered what a man traveling the speed of light on a spaceship if he looked out the window and saw a man standing still.

He daydreamed and doodled and found his passion.

DaVinci found his passion drawing machines with wings that flapped like birds – the first illustrations of what 500 years later became planes. Just doodles. Thousands of them.

Charles Darwin found his passion playing with rocks halfway around the world.

He played with them, he kicked them around, he drew pictures of the tree of life around those rocks, for EIGHT YEARS, before returning to the land of adults where he accomplished his life’s work while all of the adults jeered in his path.

Mozart found his passion when he finally escaped the adulthood of a steady job in Salzburg, for the virility of Vienna where commanding operas and orchestras and singers and actors he created Don Giovanni, the opera that changed every piece of music that ever came after that.

Marie Curie found her passion, like so many of us, by again playing with rocks. Why did some rocks seem to be like the sun, their own source of light when all else around them was pitch black dark.

Like a child, she held them in her hand, she looked hard at them, she threw them. She studied them.

Mick Jagger had no musical talent at all but would collect blues records from America and he and his childhood friend Keith Richards would lie around listening to them.

When his parents sent him off to study at the London School of Economics, he was still listening to those records and scribbling down lyrics rather than paying attention to supply versus demand.

Mary Shelley wondered what it would be like if a machine had intelligence. She daydreamed.

She called her machine Frankenstein and made up stories about how people would treat such a hybrid human/machine.

Ada Lovelace wondered what it would be like to tell a machine what to do. Could such a machine ever exist?

Steve Jobs loved calligraphy and using a key from a captain crunch box to scam the phone system.

The common thread: everyone was playing like a child, but with the experience of an adult.

Here are ten ways I still try to be a child every day.

This is how I know I will find my passion. And every day it might be different:

– PLAY

Every day I have to do something for no other reason at all than that it’s fun.

What can you do that’s fun? Play a game with someone else. Learn a magic trick. Sing.

When people want me to meet at their office I suggest the local ping pong establishment instead. It’s through Play that we get to know each other.

Or I suggest we bring a backgammon board. Or a deck of cards.

“I will beat you!” That’s the words of a child. And also the words yesterday between me and the CEO of a company I’m an advisor to.

– FREE

Nobody paid Einstein to daydream about two people staring at each other, with one going through space as fast as he could.

In fact, he was a clerk in a patent office and could’ve stayed that way forever.

Nobody paid Ada Lovelace to imagine a world of computers 120 years before one existed. She was supposed to just be a stay-at-home Countess and enjoy her luxuries.

Nobody paid the Wright Brothers to build a plane. They were racing bicycles.

Every day I know I have to pay the bills to live. But I also have to do something totally free in order not to die.

The world of money is a tiny subset of the world of imagination.

But we get into the world of money, and often lock ourselves in and throw away the key.

– WHY?

Why did the micro-cultures on one island look ever so slightly different than the micro-cultures that lived on the next? Darwin wondered.

Why did uranium give off light? Marie Curie wondered. She wondered about it until it killed her.

Why did Opera make Mozart tingle despite the acclaim he was receiving from the blander concertos popular at the time.

Why do children ask why and then why again?

“We just got divorced and then I moved to NYC,” says one man to the other. “Why?” is what I always wonder. Why did you get divorced. Why did you pick NYC?

It’s none of my business. But a kid doesn’t care. A kid asks Why?

The Whys add up. The Whys add up on the search for passion. Every day I try to find 10 things I can say “Why?” to.

3,650 “Whys” a year and you will find many things to be passionate about.

– FRIENDSHIPS

A friend of mine is working on a TV show. I’m going to meet him later today to see how it’s going.

To be honest, I want to write an episode for his TV show. Just for the fun of it. I have ideas for stories. It was my list of ten ideas each day this week.

But most of all, I want to hear all the things he’s learning by doing his TV show. And then I want to ask him about my own creative challenges.

I’m feeling stuck on something.

–––

My latest book, THE RICH EMPLOYEE, is now out in Amazon. This book gives you the tools to find satisfaction, meaning, and true wealth as a rich employee.

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Financial Fridays: The One Way I Buy Stocks

Ok. I have a confession. Not quite like a confession. More like an adjustment.

I’m only saying this because it’s Financial Fridays. But I’ve mislead a little. That’s all.

I’ve written that people should not trade stocks. People should not daytrade. People should stay out of the markets.

I believe this. But I also don’t believe it.

Too many people say to me, “I have an idea for how to trade the markets! I KNOW I have a talent for it. How should I start raising money?”

I can tell you the exact demographic of these people. It’s usually men age 16-33.

These people are going to have deep sadness. They are going to feel like killing themselves.

They are going to do what I did, and consider doing informercials for diet pills because even that is better than trading stocks. They are going to cry a lot.

And I don’t even want to admit the real thing I do because it sounds scammy. Like all the other scammy things out there.
But I think a lot of people are struggling with their decisions. So let me say what I do and you never have to hear from me about stocks again unless you want to.

I’m on 54th and 7th in NYC as I write this. And it brings back memories.

[I just recently went back to Wall Street for the first time in a while. While I was there I filmed an exclusive video. Click here to check it out]

—

When I was a kid my acne was so bad my dad would bring me into the city to a special dermatologist near his office.

I’d have almost the equivalent of surgery on my head every month to drain out all the pus from all the cysts on my face.

And then my dad would take me to his office and he’d have me do copies on the copy machine. I had a major crush on one of the secretaries but I had so many purple holes in my face she wouldn’t look at me.

I was 14. I remember her name. Charlotte. Hi Charlotte.

The copy machine always broke. I didn’t know how to fix it. Then we’d go to lunch at the Carnegie Deli.

If you’ve never had lunch there then imagine a foot tall sandwich filled with corned beef and pastrami. We’d split one.

These were the best moments in my life. Him talking to me about his theories. About his work.

20 years later, when he was in a coma, I’d pass by 54th and 7th and look at his building.

I’d be down in a trade and scared of going broke again and wishing I could just talk to him one more time.

I knew he would tell me what to do with the bad trade How to make it right. How the world was getting better.

He knew everything when I was a kid. Not a single fact did he not know.

—

I traded stocks professionally for almost thirteen years. I have a few strategies and they work and I’m doing to say in detail right now how you can do them.

I didn’t use this strategy back then. Like every idiot, I wrote a program. It worked for a few years and I made money for a lot of people and then slowly it stopped working.

People like Vladmir Putin had better people writing programs.

So I’d be in the city, my dad in a coma and I’d be crying because the only time I missed him was when I was stuck with a huge potential loss in a trade and I would want to call him just one more time.

He was like a kid. He’d look at the sky and see clouds of cotton candy.

He’d fly into the sky and with his giant hands he’d rip apart the candy and pull out wisps of education and facts. Where did he get the facts?

He was a music major. And clinically depressed and just 2 years away from a stroke.

But he would tell me about production levels in the US. And he would tell me why it was good the Euro did this and China did that and he would always cheer me up.

When I was no longer able to talk to him I’d still walk past his old office building, stuck in a trade, feeling scared and broke, wishing he could cheer me up. Wishing I could call him one more time.

Now I don’t do that anymore. I realize I’m an idiot. So I take advantage of my idiocy to make money.

—

There are plenty of websites that tell you what stocks the best investors in the world own. I even made one, stockpickr.com.

But there are sites like gurufocus.com and my favorite J3Sg.com. What does Warren Buffett own? They tell you.

Who are the best investors? They have to be people who hold for a long time, else I can’t tell if they are going to trade in and out faster than I will.

So Warren Buffett obviously. Carl Icahn. Dan Loeb. David Tepper. And about 30 or 40 more.

After beating myself over the head for years, programming thousands of programs that modeled the markets, the game was over for that type of trading.

And there’s a rule in poker. If you look around the table and can’t find the fish then you are the fish.

I was the fish.

But sometimes the fish can swim faster than everyone else. That’s my hope at least.

In 1984 I’d visit the arcade across from his office. My favorite arcade game was Defender. And then I still loved Asteroids. And then Galaxian.

And sometimes I would walk about 30 blocks down to “Forbidden Planet” which was a comic book store that is still around.

Nothing else is around. But when I was down on a trade I would remember all these magical moments from being a kid.

I wanted them back. I wanted to grab also for the clouds and treat them like cotton candy.

But it was raining and I was afraid.

—

Here’s what I do now. And it works:

I look at a site like sec.gov and I look every month at all of my favorite investors and see what stocks they are quietly beginning to buy.

They don’t go on CNBC talking about these stocks. They don’t go to the newspapers. But they have to report their holdings to the SEC in obscure filings labeled “13-D” or “13-G” or sometimes “13-F”.

They don’t talk to anyone.

Well, that’s not true. They all talk to each other. They talk to me. The information and analysis gets passed from one to the other and that’s how ultimately the stocks go up.

I was never charismatic enough to raise money when I had a hedge fund. I had some money raised but not enough.

At least two investors left meetings in the middle of my pitch and both said the same thing, “why should we invest in you when you don’t even brush your hair before meeting us.”

Another investor wanted to invest in me but said he was very conservative. He was very nice and fatherly and reminded me of my dad.

He said about the firm named after him, “The last thing we need at Bernard Madoff Securities is to see our name on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.”

—

I find all the stocks that the top funds are buying and then I pick the ones that don’t have analysts covering them. So I know the hedge funds are in first.

Then I look for the companies they are buying that are backdoor plays to the bigger guys.

Instead of looking at AAPL I’ll notice the funds might be buying the chip suppliers to AAPL.

Instead of looking at Google I’ll look to see if the hedge funds are buying companies that are managing the bandwidth for Google. The companies nobody writes about because they are boring.

Instead of looking at Pfizer, I’ll look for the companies that are making an Hep-B drug almost exactly the same as Pfizers that the hedge funds are buying.

And then I’ll often look for stocks that are trading at a discount to where the top investors bought them. It’s as if Warren Buffett is my free intern.

He’s telling me stocks and getting me coffee. WB, you idiot, I’m going to get stocks 20% cheaper than you and not pay you a dime!

And that’s it. A) If someone smarter than me is buying, B) and if the company is in a strong demographic trend, C) and the company is undervalued in some other way I can find, then I buy.

How long do I hold? Usually forever. Or until I see the hedge fund sell. Which could be years.

Does this work? Yes it does.

—

Lots of things can go wrong.

When it rains outside, normal people don’t go crazy. Rain is a part of life.

But when stocks go up and down, people go crazy. They sell when stocks go down. People run around naked on rooftops. I’ve seen it happen.

Even though stock volatility is even more normal than rain.

You don’t suppress your emotions. You don’t even act on them. You just think rationally in those cases.

Newspapers and media take advantage of the fact that people don’t understand the emotions of the markets.

They say scary things like “Apple missed earnings”.

APPLE MISSES!!

That doesn’t mean Apple lost money. It just means a bunch of idiots decided Apple’s earnings should be X and instead it was X-1. Apple is the most profitable company in history.

We live in a scary economy. It’s scary because so much is unknown.

Maybe out of 8000 public companies, 6000 are frauds (a topic for a later post).

It’s ok to be scared. But I just stick to this strategy and it works. Smarter people than me can determine if a company is a fraud.

Some other rules I follow are: I try not to have more than 30% in stocks. Too scary for me.

I try not to have more than 2-3% in any one stock. Unless it grows.

Like Warren Buffett says (and I wrote THE book on Warren Buffett according to the man himself) “why trade away Michael Jordan just because he’s the best on your team”.

I never look at the stock market because it’s boring and meaningless.

People ask me in a panic, “is there any news!?” and their favorite stock is down 3 pennies.

There’s never any new news. Better to play Asteroids. I rented an old Pac-man the last time I was on vacation.

My 13 year old actually beat me in Ms. Pac-man and I was very upset.

I saw my reflection in the glass and her reflection also. I hope I can be a good father and teach her things.

This is the last time I’m going to write about my strategy. I don’t think people in general should buy stocks.

Usually about a year after someone brags to me “I feel I have a real talent for guessing the markets” they write me again and say, “I wish I had listened to you”.

Even now when I pass 54th and 7th, I think of him. The arcade is no longer there.

I feel like flying up into the sky. Tearing up the clouds. Finding the candy like he would.

But often it’s raining and I fall back down. I zoom across the city, all of the bookstores are gone.

My dad once called me, a few months before he went into his coma.

He was at a big shopping mall. He couldn’t find his car. He was wandering around. He wasn’t even sure if he had driven to the mall or not. He was stuttering.

I rented a car and went to find him and then take him to the hospital.

He told me even then in the car that the economy was recovering. “A weak dollar is good for stocks”. I should stick in stocks. This was 2002, before anyone knew anything.

He was right. I was the fish in the room.

—

On Financial Fridays I’ll talk about a lot of issues. But I don’t think stocks again.

I feel people are mostly being abused by the system when it comes to stocks and there are lots of frauds out there. It’s very difficult.

But there’s always a good reason and a real reason. Above I gave the good reason.

But the real reason is I shot a fun video of me talking on Wall Street a few weeks ago.

It was fun.

I even play the #2 ranked woman in the US in blitz chess. That’s more fun than stocks.

Here’s the video.

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