The Social Capitalist: James Altucher Building credibility through radical honesty and good humor.

Transcription

1 The Social Capitalist: James Altucher Building credibility through radical honesty and good humor. Like many of the examples and case studies used in the mygreenlight curriculum, the guests on the Social Capitalist are often smooth, connected players with the right pedigree, the right suits, always ready to say the right thing. James Altucher is none of those things. His pedigree is a portfolio of astounding failures. His dress is less Wall Street than Occupy Wall Street, if the movement employed an IT guy. And above all, the things Altucher says inevitably piss off at least half the people who hear him say them. That s what makes it so remarkable that Altucher has grown a loyal tribe of hundreds of thousands that read his blog, opened doors to everyone from the super-secretive hedge funder Steven Cohen to Mad Money s Jim Cramer, and built enduring relationships while reinventing himself and his career in multiple industries. He s done it as an outsider, with an unorthodox style. Today, Altucher is the managing director of Formula Capital, an asset management firm and fund of hedge funds. He was the founder of Stockpickr.com, a social network for finance that had millions of unique visitors per month when it was sold to TheStreet.com in Altucher has written several books on investing, as well as, a very personal account about his experiences with success, failure and life in general in two books, How to be the Luckiest Person Alive and I Once Was Blind, But Now I See. In his spare time, he is a nationally ranked chess master. This is an edited transcript from a live Social Capitalist event. The Social Capitalist is sponsored programming of mygreenlight, the only comprehensive on-line learning platform for critical relationship development skills. The interactive interview series is dedicated to delivering in depth discussion on relationship science with the best and brightest thought leaders in business and academia. Our guest today is entrepreneur, venture capitalist, financial columnist and author, James Altucher. By way of introduction, here are a selection of things people have said about James that you can find on the internet: hedge fund hotshot; the best blogger of our generation; I'm going to kill him and eat his remains; an entrepreneurial savant; I hope The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1

2 you re not starting a cult, but if you are, I want in; an absolute moron; a genius. Also by way of introduction, here are some of the things Altucher said about himself: I was standing right next to Steve Jobs in It was the closest thing I ever felt to being gay. I regret losing all of my money and then losing my house. I regret not spending more time with my kids when they were little, and I regret not saving the life of my dad when I could ve. The summer of 2000, I lost $15 million in cash. I've loved and lost and loved again. I've tried over and over. I've been on a quest for the meaning of happiness since the age of six. Welcome James. Hi. Thanks for having me on the show. It s glad to be here. I'm very excited as I told you earlier before the show: My brother has a man-crush on you. And after reading all that I've read a few last week or so, I'm developing one as well. But why would anyone want to eat you? I wrote this post saying that parents should not send their kids to college right now. That it is a horrible decision to make and yet it seems to me such an automatic decision. Like we're brainwashed into thinking that the only way our children or even ourselves can have a happy life is if we have a college degree. And I think this is one among many decisions we're brainwashed into thinking that people should rethink. So somebody wrote to me, actually many people wrote to me, saying I was just the worst person alive for suggesting this The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 2

3 and that. Either I should be dead or the government should take away my kids or, you know, many other things. Well, I think the passion you inspire in others, culinary or otherwise, actually has a lot to do with what makes you exceptional, but we'll get to that in a bit. I wanted to start off with you. Some of my favorite writings involve you trying to deconstruct the professional or even existential lessons to be learned from people in business or the arts that you respect or have come across in your career. And it s clear that you have a deep respect for Steve Jobs. So it seems appropriate on this day, so soon since his passing, to ask what lessons you learned from him. That there s not just one path to success. You can count on many hands all of Steve Jobs flaws, and until he died, a lot of people actually put him down for various reasons. But I think Steve Jobs showed that through persistence and creativity, you can achieve success, Pixar being a great example. This was a company that was almost bankrupt on many occasions, and yet he continued to apply its technology until finally it was a success. And he did that by not only using his own creativity but by hiring and paying enormous salaries to the most creative people he could find until eventually Pixar became the massive success that it still is, owned now by Disney. The same thing goes with Apple. The guy built Apple, but then he failed. He learned how to deal with his own failure, which is something that many people don't know how to they don't teach us that in college, how to fail. And he was The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 3

4 ashamed, humiliated, and embarrassed when he was kicked out of Apple. It took a long time, but eventually, he came back. Again, he hired the best designers he could think of. He applied his own creativity, and he built Apple into the enormous, enormous success that it s going to continue to be. Failure is a big theme of your work, and we'll get to it in a second. But as long as we're on the topic of mentors, I wanted to mention a couple others and see if you could give a quick, 25-word version of the lesson you've learned from them. Financier Warren Buffet. I think Warren Buffet is again an example of persistence. This guy has been doing nothing but investing for 55 years. And he s had some failures. Over that time if you don't give up, you're going to find success. What about Jim Cramer? Jim Cramer is a magician at promoting himself. Nobody does it better. You know, you can say any criticism in the world about Jim Cramer that you wanted. There s a lot of criticisms of him, but he knows how to toot his own horn. Once when I was feeling particularly shy about going on television, he told me, Look, no one is going to publicize you if you don't do it. So from him, I learned that, and he s done a very good job of it. The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 4

5 What about the writer Charles Bukowski? Charles Bukowski. That guy has been through everything. He was an alcoholic, failed marriages, failed relationships. He was working 12-hour days at the post office, and yet he wrote every single day. And he wrote in the most simple language possible because he wanted people to be able to read him and understand him. So if you want to be a good writer or good at anything, no matter what obstacles come in your way, you have to just stick at it every single day. Bukowski is a phenomenal example of that. How many people go from being practically homeless alcoholics to being among the most successful writers in history? There s millions of his books sold. It seems to me that he s representative of kind of a triumvirate that comes up over and over in your writing and your career, which is fear and honesty and failure, and their relationship. You say that fear is the enemy of honesty: fear of losing clients, fear of pissing off family, fear of going to hell, fear of people won t like you, fear of being alone. You have all of these fears, but that honesty is a super power, as you ve described it, against that fear. How does that work? What does it mean that honesty is a super power against this fear that holds us back? Let me give you an example from my own experience. I really started my blog about a year ago. Now, I had the domain name before that, and I was posting all the articles on it that The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 5

6 had to do with stocks or the financial business or the economy or whatever. But I started being honest on my blog about a year ago. Honest about my fears, my concerns, my worries, my failures in the past and I've had some enormous failures. And traffic on my blog probably went up, I'm not even exaggerating, 20,000 percent, just by being honest. Everyday people call me with opportunities, for example, you asking me to be on your show. I'm grateful for it, and it is an opportunity that resulted from me being more open and honest on my blog. Now everyone could be honest, but a lot of people are afraid of it. So for instance, if you're a financial advisor, if you re a stock broker or if you give any kind of advice whatsoever, like a Tony Robbins, for example. Sometimes you can't always be honest because you feel like, if I tell people this, this, and this, like I lost money, or I lost my wife, or I was crying on this one particular day during the financial crisis, then people are no longer going to respect me. They no longer are going to want to do business with me. But in fact, the reality is this isn t true. Because so much of your competition is dishonest most of the time. This does not necessarily mean that they re lying. It just means that their boundaries are tight and they can't break out. If you go beyond those boundaries and are truly honest with your colleagues and your competitors and your potential customers, then you suddenly rise above the competition. Everybody knows this is you. The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 6

7 You've come to honesty recently, and it certainly has benefited you as a blogger and a writer. But, in the some 15 to 20 companies that you've started, and your career as a hedge fund manager, you ve said honestly, I was lying at that time. I wasn t honest. I wasn t honest with myself. I wasn t honest with other people and most people in business aren t. Is it really an advantage in business and your career when everyone else is lying around you and you re not? Yes. Here are some examples. For instance, let s say, and this has happened to me in the past, I've had a client where the specific needs that they had were not something I could easily fulfill. So I was happy to recommend my competitors to them. I analyzed every competitor and what their skill sets were, and I said, Here s the competitors that I think you should talk to. What does that make me at that point? Not only does it makes me honest, it makes me Google in a weird way. Why do you go to Google? You don't go to Google because of any content on Google. You go to Google to find out what other websites you should go to given certain needs you have. Google by itself fulfills none of your needs. Like if you type in I have cancer, Google will direct you to other sites. Google is not going to solve your cancer worries. So the same way, if you become the source where people know that they re going to get an honest and quality answer, then that s how they ll think of you. You are the source not The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 7

8 the competitors, you. And that s what honesty brings. Honesty turns you into a sort of virtual-human Google where people know that they can always come to you for the straight answer about where they should go to if you can't fulfill their needs. I just want to add there s a voyeurism to honesty. So if I say, this is what happened to me on the 25 dates before I met my wife, people want to see that for a voyeuristic aspect that s like reality TV a little bit. Actually it s more real than reality TV, which is supposed to be honest, but in fact, it s not. It s heavily edited. I don't edit myself. So people know that they re going to get voyeurism as well as honesty when they go to my blog or when they hear me talk. Is another benefit of your honesty fearlessness? Absolutely. You have to be able to say things like, when I was a child, my mother hit me. Or, you know, when I was on these dates, these bad things happened. Of course, you have to make sure you re not going to harm anybody else, but you have to be able to say these things knowing that people are going to look down on you. If I say, Nobody should go to college, then everyone who has just paid $200,000 to get a college degree is going to hate me. So I have to be fearless in expressing my opinion and allowing people to hate me. I can t be overly worried. Now to be honest, I actually don't like when people hate me. I take it somewhat personally. But that s part of fearlessness The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 8

9 too: I can t be inhuman. I have emotions that I have to be able to handle. This is what I think this is fascinating about you in the context of social capital. So often, we interview these smooth, connected players with the right pedigree and the right suits who always say the right thing. You're not that at all. And so the doors you've opened, which are many, and the relationships you've made, are all the more impressive and perhaps more instructive for a general audience. Because you've done it as an outsider with an unorthodox style. I want to pull that style apart for a moment. Several critical elements of it are illustrated by the story of how you got a meeting with the notoriously private hedge fund master Steve Cohen. Can you tell that story? So here s a case where persistence plays off. This technique I've used in many different instances you ll experience where you ll put yourself in front of a person and they either say no or they don t respond. So for instance, and I'll get to the Stevie Cohen example, but in my very first company that I sold, I wanted to sell it to Omnicom. So I got in front of Omnicom s head of acquisitions, and she liked the business, but we were too small at the time. And so fine, I was disappointed. But I kept the connection open. Ever month I was able to send her an update. Eventually, after a year of updates, she called me again and said, OK, we're interested. And things like that happen all the time. When you get in front of somebody, you might not get the response that you The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 9

10 want, but suddenly they become aware of you. And then the more you send them updates and hopefully the updates are positive the more likely they are to respond positively. So Stevie Cohen, I started sending him s, and he wasn t responding at all. I would send, OK, last month, I was up two percent. Then the next month, I was up three percent. The next month, I was up one percent. Finally, he wrote back and he said, What s your IM? And I was surprised. It was the first time he ever wrote back to me. And so we started IMing and then the next thing you know, I'm visiting him and pitching him on why I should work for him. In fact, he was almost pitching me on why I should work for him. In the end, it didn t end up working for him, but we were able to build up an relationship, and good things could have happened from that. I know a little bit about Steve Cohen and how protected he is and how private he is. I think it s kind of exceptional that you found your way inside. Is that a theme of your career, that you find these people who are connected to what you want to do and you just go for it? I think so, yes. But I think it s very important to remember that you can't just call someone and say, Hey, I would like to meet you, because they re never going to respond. And, in fact, that s actually kind of rude. If I call the CEO of Goldman Sachs and say, Hey, Lloyd, I want to meet you, that s almost rude. He s a busy guy. I'm imposing upon his time. The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 0

11 What you have to do, and this has worked for me many times, is you have to give. You have to give something. So for instance, when I met Jim Cramer, I didn t just write him and say, Oh, Jim, I'd like to meet you. I'll be here for breakfast at 6 a.m. Instead, I gave. I wrote, Jim, here s 10 ideas for articles you should write. I don't want to write them. You should write them. They re ideas I'm giving you for free. And Jim wrote back and said, No, why don't you write them? And then I started writing for TheStreet.com. Another case: I wanted to work for a hedge fund manager. Instead of me just saying, Hey, I want to work for you, I said to him, Here s 10 trading systems that I've written the software for. I will give you all the codes for free. Just have them and enjoy yourself. And he wrote back and said, These are great trading systems. Haven t we met? And he ended up allocating some of his own personal money for me to start trading every day. When you give, you ll receive and that s the only way you ll receive. People only want to make you money when you want to make them money. And again, that s part of honesty as well. People are always worried, oh, well, I can't give my ideas away. Listen, you'll have more ideas. If you flex your idea muscle every day, if you practice coming up with 10 good ideas a day, then your idea muscle starts to build, the way money compounds. It builds exponentially. So you'll have a flood of ideas you can give to other people. And if you just start giving ideas everyday to people, they ll respond. Some people respond, not everyone. You can't expect 20 out of 20 The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 1

12 to respond. One out of 20 is good enough if you re constantly coming up with ideas. You've created systems for, as you say, flexing that idea muscle and building it. Can you talk a little bit about that? I'm talking about from the lists that you create and how you think about those lists and how they go from being general ideas to something more concrete based on who you re going to connect to around those ideas. While some of it seems intuitive, I don't think other people have gone to the level that you have in deconstructing what it means to create value from ideas. Most people. I don't want to say most people don't have ideas, because everybody has ideas. But for most people, it s very hard when you re working your 9-to-5 job to keep your idea muscle fresh. And I call it a muscle because muscles atrophy. So if I stay in bed for a week, then and I try to get up and start walking, I won t be able to walk because my leg muscles have atrophied. It s the same thing with the idea muscle. If you don't actively attempt to build your idea muscle, then it will atrophy, and just as quickly as any other muscle in your body. So what I typically do is, I wake up early and you don't have to wake up that much earlier than you normally do. But I wake up early, I take a pad, and I simply start coming up with ideas. It might be ideas about anything. Ideas of people I might try to have lunch with today, or ideas for businesses I want to start, or ideas for articles I want to write. But I don't just have an idea like, oh, I'm going to read a Wikipedia The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 2

13 article today. The idea has to be more specific: What article do I want to read up today in order to learn more about something? The idea just can't be, I'm going to write my own article today. Again, I have to get specific: Well, I'm going to write about Steve Jobs today. Well, what about Steve Jobs? Oh, how about how he made breakout when he was 18 years old or 15 years old or whatever. So when I'm coming up with these ideas, I try to drill down as specifically as possible, but not so much so that I'm actually writing the article right there. At some point you have to back up and come up with the next idea. That s how you keep the idea muscle active and how you build it. And again, over time, it builds to a phenomenal level. So what does that mean, a phenomenal level? Well, it means you'll never have writer s block, for instance, because you'll be able to sit down, and you'll be able to write down ideas just straight off the top of your head. It also helps you as an entrepreneur. Let s say I wanted to sit down today and say, OK, I want to come up with 10 ideas for businesses I'm going start. I'll start listing the ideas, but I won t just list, I'm going to make an e-commerce site that sells something. Maybe I'll get more specific. What am I going to sell? How am I going to make it? How am I going to use Groupon to help me sell vitamins? How am I going to spec out the idea to send to the people I outsource to in Kenya? And so on. The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 3

14 You get as specific as possible with each idea without getting so much into the nuts and bolts that you can't finish developing your 10 ideas for the day. You ve described success as a sexually contagious disease. Is this at all related? What do you mean by that? Think about the first time you wanted to be successful with something. It wasn t just because you wanted to have some money in your pocket or that you wanted to be able to provide for your family. The first time you wanted to have success you wanted it because you wanted to have sex with women or men. The fact that we want to be the most attractive mate for our spouse or potential spouses or potential sexual partners drives us to succeed. When I was younger, I wanted to write a novel because I thought writing a novel would attract women to me. Later on, I wanted to have a TV show because I thought doing that would attract women to me. And finally later on, I wanted to build and sell a business. Why? Because I wanted to attract women to me. It s only later that you realize that your sexual attractiveness is only one small benefit of success. A much better way of viewing success is as a way to buy your freedom. Freedom doesn t necessarily mean, I have to relax on a yacht in the Caribbean. Freedom means having the time to pursue things that make me happier. What makes me happier is relaxing a little more and not being so stressed. Or what makes me happier is pursuing spiritual pursuits, which when you re The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 4

15 starting out, you don't necessarily have time for. But when you're older and hopefully have more freedom, you have time for it. That s an important way that people can be happy. So success sort of evolves in a person. It goes from being a sexually contagious disease, to being a means towards freedom, to being a means toward exercising the spiritual muscle, which also atrophies inside people. That reminds me of one of the ideas that you re truly passionate about and that you consider key to your success, what you call The Daily Practice. Can you talk about what that is and how you came to believe that it s key what you might call optimum functioning? So, I've had many problems. I've had businesses that have failed. I've gone completely broke. I've lost a house. I've lost a marriage. I've had lots of different roller coasters in my life that I would just as soon forget about. But one thing I do remember is that each time I was on the floor and literally, on the floor wondering how could life possibly continue after these events, only one thing helped me. And this is not based on anything I've read or studied or anything like that, it s only based on what actually did get me off the floor so that I could try again and live again and be happy again. It s what I call this daily practice, when I actually quantify it. There s basically four legs to this practice. One is physical. You can't succeed if you're sick. So if you're physically ill or not in shape or eating junk food all the time, you're not The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 5

16 going to be able to succeed. It s just not possible. Someone who is constantly ill will not be able to succeed. Two is emotional health. So if you're having a series of bad relationships or if you're constantly arguing with your family or constantly arguing with your spouse or caught cheating on your spouse, or whatever, you're not going to have the emotional health to find the energy to build a business or to succeed or to be happy. Three is mental health, and that s this idea muscle that I've discussed. You have to be able not only to generate ideas but have confidence that you're generating good ideas. And that doesn t happen overnight. That requires practice, just like physical exercise doesn t get you in shape overnight. It s over a one-month, two-month, six-month, six-year period. And then finally, four, spiritual health. You have to be able to know that there s going to be some points that are so difficult that you just say to yourself or to a higher power or to whoever, I can't do this. Help me out. I give up. And I'm not even talking about a God or anything. Just having a notion of surrender exercises that spiritual muscle and of course, also having gratitude. We're all grateful that we're alive today using Apple products, for instance. And we're sad that Steve Jobs is not alive to enjoy it with us. So we're grateful to be alive. So all four of these legs are what I call The Daily Practice when they re put together. They have to be working in conjunction in order for one to climb of that floor that you The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 6

17 put yourself on, or which has been thrust on you by your failure or poverty or losing a home or relationship or anger anger being just the manifestation of fear. I find it interesting that you're a former computer programmer and you're a terrific chess player and entrepreneur and a finance guide. You made your way in the world with a faith in logic, in the pragmatic world of business and the cutthroat world of finance. And now, suddenly, your writing sounds more like Deepak Chopra than, say, Peter Drucker. How does that happen? I love computers, and I majored in and went to graduate school in computer science. My first company was heavily based on my computer science background. My first jobs were all based on that. And yet at the end of the day, I think part of why I moved away from it goes back to success is a sexually contagious disease. I didn t see many women doing computer science, and I'm not the most good looking guy so I needed something else to help me meet people. So I started exploring writing fiction and then creating a TV show. I worked for HBO for several years, and then I finally started a company building websites for entertainment companies. So bit by bit, I made a transition and used my computer skills to help me make that transition. And everybody is passionately interested in something for several years at a time. It s hard to be passionately interested in something forever. So computer science I was interested in for a while but not forever. The last time I programmed a computer was probably about 12 years ago unfortunately, because I wish The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 7

18 now I could program. It s almost as if I've had a computer lobotomy; I was totally unable to program the last time I tried. I guess my point was that some people might say, well, you've made your millions, you've lost your millions, but you re definitely probably up at this point. And so now you have the luxury of talking about success being more about happiness and focusing on spirituality. How do you answer the charge that you're able to do this because you already have money in the bank? And that for those of us who don't, it s more street-smart, harder pragmatic lessons that we need to learn? Well, again, it was the times when I've been dirt-poor, broke, agonizing, divorced or separated, and just trying to get off the ground, it was at those points that I needed someone to throw me the safety line. Spirituality is a part of that. Spirituality is almost a bad word. We're Americans, so we re more about freedom from religion, freedom from spirituality, in a sense. But again, I think it s not so much the word spiritual. I'm not looking for any spirits to help me out. But the idea of surrender to either this creative super power inside of myself or to some higher power that I'm not aware of that s what I really mean by spirituality. Could be coming from inside of yourself, outside of yourself, doesn t matter. It doesn t mean an old man and a beard. It doesn t mean a super conscience. It could just mean I'm surrendering to the creative force inside of myself that I hardly ever use, and just saying, Look, I've done all I can. That s it. I give up. I need The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 8

19 help. And having confidence that by learning to surrender and give up in that way, you will get the help that you asked for. And I've gotten that help when I've had negative in the bank. So that s really why I m convinced that these four legs of success are needed whether you have a billion dollars or zero dollars. And I'm somewhere in the middle, probably closer to zero dollars, but it still helps me every day when I'm trying to figure out what direction my life is and how can I help people and how I can achieve the most with the years that I have left. In your new book, I Was Blind But Now I See, you talk about The Daily Practice, and you talk about these failures, and you give the evolution of how you got to this place. Critical to that is several chapters on why you should quit your job, or what happens when you quit your job toward gaining this freedom that you're talking about. How did you come to this? And is it a dicey proposition to tell everyone out there that they need to become a free agent, or is the economy changing such that this is actually a more secure path than employment? Well, there s several answers. We've been taught since an early age that corporate America, big corporate America, is safe. So if you work for General Electric, you're never going to lose your job. You're going to retire with a pension and with a life savings and life will be good and a gold watch when you're 65 years old. We've learned in the past three years, even 10 years, that that s a myth. I met a guy the other The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 1 9

20 day, he worked at General Motors for 38 years. He wasn t in top management, and he wasn t in a union. He was middle management, so what happened to him? When GM went bankrupt, he lost his job. He lost his life savings. He lost his pension. And fortunately, he had some money tucked away. Corporate safety is a total myth. So if you're trying to rise up through the ranks your company and hope that that s going to help you achieve happiness and freedom, that s just not true. It s just a myth. Another point is, when you work a job, so much of your money is taken out via taxes. Much better is to build a business, to kind of hustle to have multiple streams of incomes. That helps you manage the tax situation. And in general, you feel good about yourself creating for multiple companies or clients, so you're not dependent on any one person. I think we've seen the hustle a lot more in these past three years. One- or two-person businesses have spiked up just as unemployment has spiked up. So we're seeing people leave the corporate world and start one-person businesses, because they realize it s been a myth all along, the idea of corporate safety. Not only that, it s really hard to deal with a boss. Most bosses don't know how to manage people, so I don't like doing it and most people I know don't like doing it. And no, it doesn t mean you ll go immediately from your corporate job at General Electric to being the most successful entrepreneur in the world. It s a process. But the process The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 2 0

21 begins with doing The Daily Practice. And I can guarantee, within six months of that, you'll be able to make the jump. You'll have the ideas, you'll have the execution ability, you'll have the network, and you'll be able to jump from that corporate American job to your own reality that you create, not some corporate manager. So the answer is entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurship or lifestyle businesses, where you're doing consulting or you're building income that suits your lifestyle. And so it might mean building a business where you sell products or services and have employees and so on, or it might just mean, I m doing consulting for three or four people. It s going to take up 30 hours of my week and I'm going to be happy do it. And I don't necessarily need to grow a big business to be happy. I'm going to downsize, perhaps. You know a lot of people who get caught up in the corporate rat race. They need the best dishwasher and the white picket fence. They need a nice home and they need the nicest cars. We don't need these things. We can be perfectly happy with second best on a lot of these things. This is the keeping up with the Joneses mentality that corporate America gives us, and on purpose so that we feel obliged to continue working for corporate America. I mean, think about the myth of owning a home: You have to own a home to have roots, to be happy. A lot of people make that lifestyle choice that they have to own a home. But the reality is, when you own a home, suddenly you've become The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 2 1

22 less flexible. You can't move to find the ideal job for yourself. You owe the banks, suddenly, an enormous amount of money. The banking systems are trillion-dollar industry because you owe them money. And that continues on and on for everybody who believes in the myth that owning a home gives you the roots that you need to be happy. So again, it s not so much being an entrepreneur as managing your expectations, coming up with ideas, having a sense of surrender or spirituality, being in good health so that people around you recognize that and want to have you around them, and also being emotionally healthy so that doesn t bog you down while you're trying to find multiple sources of income. And by the way, a lot of people have bad relationships with their bosses that keep them from being emotionally healthy. They need to leave those situations. It seems to me one of the more tactical considerations of this sort of work life that you're talking about, something that you would seem to have mastered, is developing this thing that they call a personal brand. You do it on a scale that most won t, but we're getting questions from people who want to know how developed your brand to the point where you found yourself doing public speaking and being the TV talking head. Is there anything that you learned from that that you can pass on to other people to do this on a more local scale? Actually, it s incredibly easy. Let s take apart the word personal brand. Because what is a brand? Companies like Coca-Cola spend billions of dollars on branding. When you The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 2 2

23 see a Coca-Cola commercial, for instance, you might see a beautiful girl on roller skates who finishes her roller skating and now she drinks Coca-Cola, and you see the sunlight and the fizz is going into the sky. It s this amazing picture of beauty meant to make you think, I want that life too! The reality is, that s not what Coca-Cola is. Coca-Cola is this brown drink that has 16 spoonfulls of sugar in it and various dyes. And so Coca-Cola has to lie in order to brand itself. And I'm not saying they re doing this in a mischievous way. That s how they make a living. I want to separate out the word personal from branding. I think a personal brand is the moment wwhen you start to lie. Focus first on the personal and you beat up all the competition instantly.just being honest, being yourself, doing the work, applying the daily practice for just a few months, and your personal self will come to life more than it ever has before. You'll be honest with the people around you and that automatically beats all the competition because their too slick, too dishonest, too focused on their brands. You re not focused on that anymore. When you come up with honest, sincere ideas for people, and you give rather than expecting to take, then you suddenly have separated yourself out from 99 percent of the competition. You win. And it s that easy to do it. Can you put some flesh on those ideas by giving an example that shows it in practice? The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 2 3

24 Yeah, sure. When I write right now and I'm speaking about writing in terms of my blog, but I can also speak about it in terms of business. When I write right now, I am always honest with my personal stories. I don't just write, 10 Ways to Be a Better Person. I write, Here s what happened to me when I was a bad person. I lost all my money. I was a horrible investor. I lost my marriage. I lost my home. I was lying on the floor. I have one story about when I wrote an ad on Craigslist pretending to be a psychic just so that people would write back to me and I could communicate with people. At the end of the day, what really helped me was the Daily Practice, being honest, and then in the case of this blog, starting to share my honesty. And then before you know it, I started getting incoming calls: Hey, here s my business. Could you invest in it? Can I do anything for you? Can I be an intern for you? Would you like to speak at my event? We would love you have you speak and pay you some money. And I wasn t even asking for all this. All I had to do was be honest on my blog, and suddenly it separated my blog from all the other financial blogs, or the self-help blogs and the motivational blogs and so on. I ve actually increased my business life by telling the most horrific, horrible stories about myself. Actually telling people how I lost millions of dollars was enough to get people to hire me to do things. Do you think that modern, organized business is built on a structure that absolutely doesn t allow that? Where business is not personal and you don't bring those sort of things to The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 2 4

25 the table, at least down low of the organizational chart. Do you think that people who work at companies can use these ideas to their benefit as well? Absolutely. Everybody who works in a company should be thinking in this way that I'm describing. Sincere voices always rise to the top. And if they don't, then that s not the business for you to be in. When I worked at HBO, the television network, I was a junior programmer in the IT department. But what I really wanted to do was have a TV show. So first, I pitched to them special things I thought they should do on their website that I could do which sort of seemed like TV shows. And then I pitched directly to their television department: Here s an idea I would like to do for your television show. Then they give me the opportunity to do it. They paid me to do a pilot. So I got what I wanted by being honest. I gave away ideas and I came up with good ideas. That pilot idea kind of came out of my programming. The idea was, What are people up to at 3 in the morning at New York City on a Tuesday night? Because if you're out at 3:00 in the morning on a Tuesday night, there s a reason for it, and it s not a good one. So I did that for HBO s website for three years, then I pitched it as a TV pilot, and they let me do it. It never aired but I had fun doing it. Your journey has been fascinating because you've done so many things and you ve failed so much and I say that as a positive because I think you learned certain things through failure, and gained an experience that you can t learn any The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 2 5

26 other way. We re coming to the end of our time, so here s my final question: What s the next stage for you? You know, I don't know. And I would really like to know. I think every day about that. Every day right now I'm really enjoying writing on my blog, jamesaltucher.com. I have writing every single day as a discipline. I don't know how long that will last, but I feel that as this blog gets bigger, more opportunities will come. So I hope that the next step for me is that I can continue to help people more through my blog as I build more traffic. Every month is bigger than the month before. Today will be, probably, my biggest traffic day ever, and I'm excited about that. So we'll see where it goes. Well, you're a fascinating man, Mr. Altucher. I thank you for taking the time to talk to us. For more information about mygreenlight, visit For more information about the Social Capitalist events, visit our blog at where you can sign up for notification and recordings of future events. For more information about James, visit His most recent book is I Was Blind But Now I See. The Social Capitalist: James Altucher 2 6