James Altucher Episode Transcript

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Aaron Berg [00:00:01] I'm Aaron Berg. I'm many things. A son, a husband, an immigrant, a dad. I'm also a Jew and I fought every stereotype there is about us. I was a bodybuilder, a male stripper. I worked in the sex trade. I became a stand up comedian. And I realized that to be Jewish is to be bad ass. Join me and celebrate all the bad ass Jews out there. And let me tell you, there are a ton. Business moguls, game changers, assassins. They come from every walk of life. This is Bad Ass Jews. And I'm your host, Aaron Berg. Our guest today is the epitome of a bad ass Jew. Looking at him you would think the exact opposite. He looks as stereotypical of a Jew as you could ever imagine. So much so, he looks like a drawing of Nazi propaganda. But, throughout his life, from being born in New York City, he has won and lost. Overcome and overcome again. He has hung out with leaders of the free world and some of the biggest losers of the free world. An amazing man, an innovator in terms of finance, and now a cultivator of the arts. Welcome our Bad Ass Jew for today, James Altucher.

James Altucher [00:01:38] Aaron, thank you so much for having me on the show. And I said yes only because no one has ever called me a bad ass before. So I had to officially become one by coming on this show.

Aaron Berg [00:01:48] When people look at you, James, they don't think bad ass you initially, right. You had people come up to me on the street and they'll ask me for advice about Bitcoin just because of the way I look. And because also you were an expert in Bitcoin. It's not a stereotypical thing where they go. That guy looks Jewish. He must be good with money. You were at the forefront of the Bitcoin thing and you are on all the news channels, but you look super Jewish. Our show is about people that have gone a non traditional Jewish route. And you've done that. There's so much about you that's rebellious, so much about you that you shun in terms of mainstream culture. So let's start at the beginning. Born in New York, 1968.

James Altucher [00:02:32] Yes. And by the way, I should say, I'm practically kicked out of Judaism because I've lost all my money so many times that really the synagogue doesn't want me to potentially ruin their sacred, you know, holy space. Like I'm the Jew who loses all his money constantly.

Aaron Berg [00:02:49] That's a very counter Jewish thing to do. In Manhattan, your parents had you.

James Altucher [00:02:57] Yeah. Yeah. In Manhattan and in Manhattan now to this day.

Aaron Berg [00:03:00] You live on the Upper West Side. So tell me what it's like being a New Yorker, being born and raised as a Jew in New York.

James Altucher [00:03:10] You know, well, New York in the 70s was was was horrific. Right? It was just you know, there was there's a famous New York Post headline where the president says to the mayor, New York City drop dead. And, you know, New York was bankrupt. The subways were disgusting, even worse than now. So I grew up part of the time in the suburbs in New Jersey, which is a very Jewish thing to do, was to go with the the exodus, the what he called the diaspora of Jews out of New York City to New Jersey and Long Island and so on. And then, you know, I had a normal life, but then eventually move back to New York in the early 90s and this new thing was happening that was so exciting, which was the Internet was going mainstream. And there were about five of us in the city who knew how to make a Web site back in 1994. And so that kind of started me off on a particular direction. I was so excited about this brand new thing and everyone thought I was going insane like James J. I worked at HBO and people would say to me, James, that the Internet might have been good for academics or when you were in college. But why do you let HBO do what they're good at? Like they know the they know network. They know entertainment better than anyone else. Let them do the cable thing, not this Internet thing. And so they thought it was going to be worth zero. So while I was at HBO, I started on the side helping other companies build their Web sites. So it was crazy at work all day at HBO. And my salary was a massive forty thousand a year. I couldn't afford to live anywhere in Manhattan. I've lived with my parents and and then at night I'd be working on, like with the Wu Tang Clan, working on the Loud Records Web site and the Wu Tang Clan's Web sites. And then I start doing all of Puffy's Web sites. Then I started doing death row records, Web sites. You know, Miramax dot com. I did that. I did The Matrix, all the Matrix Web sites, the screen movies. Anyway, I sat on the side while I was making my measly forty thousand year that I was afraid to give up. I started a company a few blocks away. I started to hire employees and I start to get all these clients. I made American Express dot com. And again, I had no competition. Normally, nobody would hang out. Nobody would hire somebody. I had like one outfit and I would pull it out of my. Garbage bag every day in my studio apartment that eventually I forwarded. And then I would go to American Express and convince them that, hey, one day you're gonna be doing all your business on a Web site. And they would just laugh. And then they would hire me and they would hire me for what they thought were ridiculously cheap prices. But like I charged two hundred fifty thousand dollars to make. American Express dot com. When my full time job was paying me forty thousand a year. Yeah. And. And it was crazy because I still want to leave my full time job. I was so scared to leave, even though I had at some point I had, you know, over a dozen employees then 15 employees then 20 employees and I had to build out ten thousand square foot of space. Then I had every gangsta rap record label. I was doing all of their websites. And of course, you know, in addition to being Jewish, I look very much like a gangsta rapper, as you've often called me and, you know, and then things took off from there.

Aaron Berg [00:06:41] So let me backtrack, because this this was the inception of your career. But where did this come from? Were both your parents were Jewish?

James Altucher [00:06:50] Yeah.

Aaron Berg [00:06:51] Conservative reform.

James Altucher [00:06:54] Communist.

Aaron Berg [00:06:54] Just Communist.

James Altucher [00:06:56] Yes. They grew up with no you know, Marxism. There's no religion. Right. So they did not grow up with any Judaism at all.

Aaron Berg [00:07:06] And you were barmitzvahed?

James Altucher [00:07:08] Yeah,  I wanted to fit in with my Jewish friends. And they were all getting Barmitzvahed. But I wanted to have a big party.

Aaron Berg [00:07:14] Your parents did not force you to go to Hebrew school. They didn't want you to have no idea.

James Altucher [00:07:20] Yeah, I was totally my idea. They didn't want to spend the money.

Aaron Berg [00:07:24] So you say I want to get a bar mitzvah. You want them to throw the party. Where where do you have your bar mitzvah.

James Altucher [00:07:30] In New Jersey just a regular suburban. Everybody gross bar mitzvah worry. We all try cigarets for the first time in the bathroom at some, like, you know, diner. And that was it. Now you're lying.

Aaron Berg [00:07:47] I'm all your friends were Jewish at the time.

James Altucher [00:07:50] Most of them, yeah.

Aaron Berg [00:07:51] This is the need to be accepted into the Jewish community. Kind of drove you to want to have a bar mitzvah.

James Altucher [00:07:58] Yeah. Let me ask you, do you can you read or speak Hebrew at all?

Aaron Berg [00:08:03] Barley.

James Altucher [00:08:03] Yeah. Like, I like I can't I if I were to go to a synagogue now I don't. Or if I go to like, God forbid, a Seder, I want to fit in, like I wouldn't be able to do anything. I don't know anything. I don't know any of the prayers. Nothing.

Aaron Berg [00:08:15] I have to read the English transliteration.

James Altucher [00:08:18] Yeah. I and I would barely even be able to do that like all the sounds. Can't do it.

Aaron Berg [00:08:24] So you're 13, you get Barmitzvahed. When do you start to feel this rebellious nature. Do you feel Jewish growing up or do you feel a cultural tie because your parents weren't religious? How did you feel about the religion? How did you feel about the notion of anti-Semitism or Israel? Were these thoughts for you at all?

James Altucher [00:08:48] Zero. I'll tell you, the closest I got to feeling religious was, you know, I was imagine a 12 year old, 13 year old, huge glasses. My hair was so tangled, it was practically dreads. I had acne and cysts all over my face and body I had braces. But it was the kind of braces where I was like, remember the rubber bands and the silver and everything. And then I. I was out and then my head was like, as at least as big as my entire torso. And so I and I really wanted a girlfriend, which was impossible for me. And like I like in my school, all the love, you know, the jocks were all blond haired kids with blue eyes and they got all the girlfriend. So this is the closest I came to religion was I got obsessed with wanting to figure out how to astral project, you know, meditate so you could send this supposedly send this like ghost like version of yourself out of your body. And then I would find some girl I had a crush on and basically spy on her while invisible go get close. I believe that that was possible. And so I would have learned how to meditate because I thought that would lead to me seeing my classmates naked. And that's the closest I saw. I read all these books about like Zen Buddhism, because that's how I figured this would happen. And that's the closest I got to religion growing growing up.

Aaron Berg [00:10:19] And the goal of your affections, was it primarily Jewish girls? Is that why you were attracted to.

James Altucher [00:10:27] No, I liked. Well, I like them all. I liked every girl. Like, if any girl had even looked my way, I would have had an image. And instead, I would have married her right then at the age of twelve. Like that. I was just obsessed. I would like an. But I was like. It's bad enough being who I am now. I was hideous at the age of 13, so we would learn. I don't know why they would teach us this, but in physical education, we'd learn square dancing and literally the girls would not. They would hold their hands like this three. They would socially distance even while we were supposed to be square dancing together. No one would touch me. And that's it. So I figured my only way was to basically use superpowers, which I never got.

Aaron Berg [00:11:16] So you growing up as an outsider, you turned to Judaism to be accepted, but you still feel like an outsider. You're this weird Zen Buddhist type of Jew, which is kind of like post-modern. It's it's a very popular aspect, you know, like all of these Jews that are just into Kabbalah and stuff like. Yeah, like Madonna turned to see you had this spiritual aspect to you because you were trying to avoid the physicality of you. You weren't happy with the physical. So you went on the inside.

James Altucher [00:11:48] Right. Like, literally this is this when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I was meditating two hours a day. I'd meditate for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. And you know, all my time I would read books about Buddhism, Daoism, because I was sure and I really had no other motive other than I wanted to develop this imaginary mythical superpower.

Aaron Berg [00:12:13] Most 15 16 year olds would do something that starts with an M. and ends with a tate one or two hours a day. But it wasn't meditate, OK?

James Altucher [00:12:22] I honestly thought that if I did that, that that would prevent me from successfully astral projecting.

Aaron Berg [00:12:31] This is phenomenal. You may be an alien by this point in time. So how is school going when you're in these teen years? How are you doing in terms of grades?

James Altucher [00:12:41] Awful. I would skip school all the time. I would cut school because there was I would just I'd go to school. There would be these huge twenty five year olds who are still juniors in high school. And they were all, you know, push me around and stuff. So I would just cut school all the time. One time I even applied and got a job at a newspaper while I was a junior in high school. And I don't know what I was thinking, but I would just start cutting school all the time to go to this job. And then eventually the school called my parents. Everybody got upset and I almost got thrown out of school. But I was I was a horrible student, didn't have that. I had like a A solid C plus B minus average.

Aaron Berg [00:13:25] The traditional Jewish root would be you go to school, you get good grades, you do what your friends are doing, you go to law school or you become a doctor, you know, right away. This isn't for you, are you? Do your parents get upset that you're blowing off school? They're getting phone calls, you're going to this part time job?

James Altucher [00:13:42] Yeah. Yeah. They were very upset. They were they were horrified at everything I was doing. They thought I was and I never touched any drugs, but they thought, like, why am I just staying in my room for hours ahead of time with the lights off and, like, the door locked? They just thought I was like, very strange and unusual. They thought I was on drugs. They wanted me to go for drug tests. I don't even know there were drug tests then. But they wanted to take me to one. And, you know, and then and then but, you know, parents back then, too, were very hands off. Like, I didn't even see my parents at all. Did you see your parents during the day?

Aaron Berg [00:14:17] Yeah. I mean, I was a little bit of a latchkey kid, but, you know, they were always there by dinner. I remember my dad always being home by like five or six, even though he would leave early in the morning. Do you feel like if you had more of a traditional Jewish household, you would have been more focused on school?

James Altucher [00:14:36] So in twelfth grade, my senior year of high school, I got obsessed with something else, which was I needed an extra player for my school's chess team. I knew the roles. I didn't know anything else. I went with them. I was playing the bottom, you know, the whoever the worst player was on the other team and some other town. I beat the person and I'm like, oh, this feels good. Like I had some success at something. And so I got obsessed with chess. And and when I say obsessed, like there was twenty four hours a day. And so by the end of my senior year, I was the highest ranking person under 21, maybe in New Jersey. I was New Jersey's junior state champion, was one of the top juniors for my age group in the country. And then when I was applying to Cornell and going to the interview, my interviewer was a lower ranking. Chess player than me, and he had happened to have been right before I showed up for the interview, we happened to have been studying a game from a 1972 match between two great chess players. I was very familiar with the match, and I basically gave him a chess lesson as my interview. And I got into Cornell like a day later. Yeah. This was at that point, I was probably the best chess player in the Ivy League at that point. And but I lost interest in chess. I rarely ever played again,.

Aaron Berg [00:16:11] Again, nontraditional routes that that keep popping up in your life. So you go to Cornell. How's that? What's the experience like going to a great school when you hate school?

James Altucher [00:16:25] Well, it was great because you're free from your home. And so I didn't show up for any I didn't go any classes or anything like that. I didn't I didn't specialize in anything for my first two years there. I finally met a girl. And, of course, as I had predicted, even when I was told, I moved in with her instantly as soon as I matter it freshman year. And and then I started a business while at Cornell. So I got interested in that. And but I was I was not showing up for any classes. I mean, one time I showed up for class and no one was there. And I ran into somebody who I recognized in the hallway. And why was anyone in class? And they said, well, we just it was the final yesterday, like we that there's no class anymore. And so I had to convince the teacher, like, hey, I was sick. You know, some B.S. thing. And he gave me the same final exam that he gave everyone else, which I had a copy of, because he'd already given it to everyone else. And he let me do it at home. So that was kind of exemplary of the way I passed classes in college. Like there was always I don't want to say a scheme, but there was always a trick that I had to do to pass. So, for instance, I had to graduate. I couldn't afford college, so I borrowed to pay for it. And then I worked every summer and I would win chessboards, I'd win money, a chess tournament. And then I also skipped a year. So I took so many classes at a time that I was able to skip a year, even though I wasn't really going. And I wasn't I wasn't getting good grades and my grades were so poor that I was a little tiny bit below the GPA needed to graduate and so I had to go to a professor who had given me a D minus my last semester and convince him to give me a D plus instead of a D minus so I could graduate. But I graduated in three years instead of four, so I save some money. And that was that was college.

Aaron Berg [00:18:31] So first job out is working for the I.T. department at HBO.

James Altucher [00:18:36] So then I went to graduate school. And so what I did was I got really obsessed with computer science and it once again, bad grades. Every grad school rejected me. I applied to 20 grad schools. They all rejected me until one of the best computer science grad schools in the country. They were working on a chess computer and it was the best chess computer in the world that eventually became the chess computer, deep blue, well bought by IBM to beat Garry Kasparov, who was the world champ chess champion in the 90s. And they they had this graduate school. Carnegie Mellon had a chess master who was a student there, but he had just gotten his P.H. day and had left. So they needed the chess player. So they accepted every grad school rejected me. This one, which was like rank number two or three. And the country accepted me only because of my chess and put me in the eye. My office was me and the chess computer, and I just had to play it all day long so it would learn from from how I was playing it. And eventually then IBM offered me a job because it what they IBM wanted me to work on the chess computer once they took the chess computer. But I liked a girl in Pittsburgh, so I rejected that job, stayed in Pittsburgh, and then she broke up with me and I went to HBO.

Aaron Berg [00:19:57] Walk me through. Making the first goal financially, was it? I Want to Be a Millionaire. Was it I Want to be a multi-millionaire. What was the thinking behind getting rich or was it just I want to pursue my passion.

James Altucher [00:20:19] It was the ladder. I had zero interest in money. I so I had changed obsessions once again. And I really I really became obsessed with writing novels. So that's why I took the job at HBO, was to get a little closer to the entertainment business. And so I really wanted to do a TV show. So here I was. Was this like my title was junior programmer analyst in the I.T. department. But I was constantly, like, sneaking my way over to the CEO's office to pitch TV shows. And so I was just. But at the same time, I was there, like I said before, I was like only five people in New York City who knew how to build a website then. So HBO gave me money to shoot a pilot of a TV show. Amazingly, like, I don't know why they did it. But in exchange, I was building their Web site now to build their Web site. They asked me, hire a company. So I taught my brother in law that the Web and the Internet. And I said, you need to pitch every the other five companies are pitching HBO. They're pitching me to do HBO dot com. I need you to pitch also. And he said, I don't know what to do. I don't speak English. I'm I'm French. I don't know how to write English. So I wrote his proposal and submitted it to myself. And then I chose the best candidate for the job to build a those Web site.

Aaron Berg [00:21:43] Which was which was you, a.k.a. your French brother in law.

James Altucher [00:21:47] Right. And so so I took with my brother in law. That was our first client. And then we started our business on the side. And I was running Atrius Web site. And at the same time, I was going out every Tuesday night at 3:00 in the morning. I was going out with a film crew and interviewing people in New York City. What are you doing out at 3:00 in the morning on a Tuesday night? If like like Aaron, if you were out. What do you think about the last time you were out at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, not on a Saturday, but on a Tuesday. Probably nothing good is happening now. Might be different for you because comedy happens at night. But for many people, nothing good was how would have been years ago, would have been when I was still drinking.

Aaron Berg [00:22:29] It would have been after standup shows all night. And then I would stay out drinking till 4:00 in the morning. So I'd be at a bar, be right. Trying to meet a girl, getting drunk. That's that would be the gist of it.

James Altucher [00:22:40] Right? Right. So you would be doing it professionally in a weird way, 3:00 AM was was your was your job. And. But a lot of people on a Saturday night, they're out because they're party and at the bar. But on a Tuesday night, it was mostly just particularly in the 90s in New York City. It was mostly, you know, hookers, pimps, drug dealers and their clients and homeless people and just other shady scenes. So I did this for two and a half years. Every Tuesday and Wednesday night, I'd go out at 3:00 in the morning and I basically turned over every rock in New York City. I interviewed thousands of people. What are you doing outside at 3:00 in the morning? And I shot a pilot called 3:00 a.m. and I also did made it as a Web series on the HBO dot com Web site for four for almost three years. I did this and it was it was a big part of my it was a big part of my life. But that's what I really wanted to do. And I figured by keeping control of the Web site with my own company and at the same time making a little bit extra money because not a little bit, but, you know, significant extra money, because I was started doing more and more Web sites and I couldn't slow that part down because my my sister and my brother in law, this was their livelihood. And I was, in a weird way, the salesperson, because my brother law couldn't speak English. So I was the way I was in the middle of the day at HBO. I'd sneak out, get out, you put a suit on, go over to JP Morgan, pitched them a Web site, then go back to HBO to continue programing on whatever I was programing on making forty thousand a year. And, you know, when I was doing this everyday stuff like that.

Aaron Berg [00:24:21] Is this built in to your DNA? Do you feel like you push yourself to be this extraordinary person that you're like, I gotta be up first thing in the morning, I got to be the last guy awake? No, because what motivates you? What's what pushes you?

James Altucher [00:24:37] I really wanted to do. I was obsessed with doing a TV show and I figured I needed a little bit of financial freedom for that. And I was still right trying to write novels. I wrote four novels during this time. None of them ever got published or saw the light of day. And and I didn't I really hated business. I really hated all the people. I hated everybody I was selling to. And then you have to pretend to be friends with them. And, you know, I couldn't afford a therapist, so I would see my wife's astrologer and tell her I just hated myself because I was pretending to be friends with all these people at death row records when I couldn't stand them. And. And then I was doing my three a.m. stuff, and that's the only thing I really cared about. So finally, I saw my little sister was like in junior high school and she was telling me, oh, she's learning how to build a website. And I'm thinking myself, oh, so this thing that I'm charging hundreds of thousands of dollars per client for. You're learning in junior high school. This is not a good idea anymore. So I aggressively tried to sell the business, which I suceeded. I left HBO finally, and I made it my full time job to sell this business. And I sold it in 1998 and I made a lot of money. And, you know, I still keep in touch with some of those clients that I had then, like, you know, you know, at these record labels and movie studios.

Aaron Berg [00:26:08] And so you're hanging out with, you know, gangster rappers. And here you are, this little nerd. He ju yeah. It's really good at chess and computers. What's that like? Are there any highlights that that pop out of those meetings and those things.

James Altucher [00:26:25] Oh yeah. I mean, like, look, I'd be meeting with the Wu Tang Clan had this manager power. His name was Power. And he, like he you know, the Wu Tang Clan, they were all into chess. So he'd like want to go with me. I'd go to this place in Harlem where everybody was a really good chess player. This one park on one hundred forty eighth and St. Nick. And he'd want to go and play and hang out. And he was like, Hey man, you're part of the Wu Tang family. And old dirty bastard called me up and you know, we'd talk about his website. Mobb Deep would hang out in our offices and you could see each everybody they all had, you know, two or three guns apiece. And, you know, it was it was pretty. There were so many crazy things like, you know, we did the websites, you know, again, we did Harvey Weinstein's Web sites. And so I would hear just horror stories about that guy.

Aaron Berg [00:27:17] And so this is back in in the innovative days of Miramax when they were just starting.

James Altucher [00:27:23] Yeah. I mean, they had started. And I remember we did the Scream Web site and then the Scream Two and Scream Three.

Aaron Berg [00:27:31] Did you meet Harvey Weinstein or was.

James Altucher [00:27:33] No. No, but but everybody was terrified of him. Like they were terrified, like they ever he would just fire people if he didn't like the way you tie your shoes, he would buy you. So, so, so it was so much pressure.

Aaron Berg [00:27:47] You know, looking back now, it wasn't the people that would tie their shoes. It was the people that would untie their shoes that night.

James Altucher [00:27:52] That was the problem. But it was more immediate. The people who are tying them incorrectly. Yeah. You know, we did new line films, October films. Then we start doing we did The Matrix, all the Web sites for The Matrix movies. And it was you know, there were some fun moments, but I really I don't like business. Like, you even see me at the comedy club. I couldn't tell you the first thing about running a comedy club. And I own a comedy club. You know, it's I'm not really I kind of just almost luck into it, like, so we would start doing all of loud records, Web sites. So that would be Wu Tang Clan, Mobb Deep, some other artists. And then Puffy would be like, OK, we need a Web site. So I'd start doing Bad Boy, Bad Boy records Web sites. OK, then then interest goes. Why we need a Web site. We can't let these guys. So start doing death row Interscope. It just kind of word of mouth. I kept doing more and more Web sites, but I was also desperate to sell because I saw the light or the I saw where the tunnel was going and it wasn't very pretty.

Aaron Berg [00:28:58] Like, you knew kids were gonna be able to do this in a couple of years.

James Altucher [00:29:02] Right. And here's what a bad businessman I was, is that I wrote software to make it really easy for my summer would hire me to build a website for like sixty thousand dollars. But I wrote software for myself that I wouldn't show anybody that would let me build a Web site in basically a matter of minutes. And the reason I say I was stupid is that we were a very profitable company. If I had said no, no, no, don't be profitable. Let's sell the software to build Web sites that would have made me a lot more money. Like WordPress is worth over a billion dollars. So so I made the mistake of hiding the software because I didn't want people to know. It only took me a few minutes to create something that I was charging sixty thousand dollars for. And and so we were just a profitable Internet company, the only one maybe. And so we didn't get as much money, say, as some of our competitors and peers.

Aaron Berg [00:29:59] You're doing Web sites for all the rappers at this time, all the prevalent rappers, knowing that there's like an East Coast, West Coast rivalry, that some of these people would literally murder other people?

James Altucher [00:30:13] Oh, yeah.

Aaron Berg [00:30:14] I remember once I saw the Common Core between all these rap rivalries. Do they know that you're doing all the Web sites for all these labels?

James Altucher [00:30:23] Oh, yeah. And they were. I think there's a thing where it's like they would look at me and I would look at them and we each really didn't know how. It was just different backgrounds. Like one time I was having dinner with a guy at death row who had just gotten out of jail and he was like. Man, if if if if Snoop shows his face, then we know where to find him and like everybody was just talking this talk and then but they were always like, hey, man, we'd love love to stop our office and see how, you know, do videos and graphics and stuff like, you know, all that computer stuff. Can you show us? And and I'm like, oh, well, we just work at home. We don't really have an office. We had an office by the guy from death row wasn't coming to it. So, you know, it was just like they in a weird way, we were each intimidated by the other. And it was you know, that part was interesting. And I was very much into that culture to some extent. I mean, I knew a lot about it. And we even tried to make a record label at one point, but it didn't work out. We were always trying to figure out some way out of that horrible Internet business. Like, I hated it. We tried to make a tea company. We tried to make a record label. And at the same time, I had the software written to make a billion dollar company. But instead I was just dealing with all these clients that were I really just dislike them. I don't want to say they're idiots because they were very smart, but I, I just didn't like them.

Aaron Berg [00:31:48] Right now you're hanging out with rappers. Where does your interest for currency come in and how were you so on the cutting edge of knowing where Bitcoin was going?

James Altucher [00:32:03] Well, for a long time. So after I sold his first company, I had I didn't know anything about money. I didn't know anything about investing. I didn't know anything about money. Everybody was asking me for money advice because they thought because I had some money. I must know something. I bought the most expensive apartment in New York City and I started investing in Internet companies and blah blah blah. Well, I went from having 15 million cash in the bank. I was I had cashed out it was cash was in my checking account. And then there was a point. And then I lost so much money so quickly, I was losing a million dollars a week. And at one point I looked at my a.T.M and I had one hundred forty three dollars left.

Aaron Berg [00:32:49] How did you lose a million dollars a week?

James Altucher [00:32:51] I was just investing during this dot.com bust and I bought a huge apartment. I read, retrofitted it, whatever. The apartment was two blocks away from a little building called the World Trade Center. And so right when I went broke, we were there. Our building was part of the crime scene, so I couldn't sell then. And I just went completely dead broke. And I was so just depressed, like I had two little babies at this point.

Aaron Berg [00:33:21] So let me say this. Fifteen million dollars within two months. You have one hundred and forty three dollars and you can't access your apartment because it's mere feet from the World Trade Center.

James Altucher [00:33:33] Yeah, I was in my apartment. Nobody else could access it. So it was about. It was about a five or six month period. But yeah, I was at the World Trade Center when the planes hit. So. And then I.

Aaron Berg [00:33:45] And then just our building was you were at the World Trade Center when the inside or in your apartment?

James Altucher [00:33:51] No, here's what happened. I was there was a Dean and DeLuca. I was a day trader then, which is fitting considering I was losing all their money. Day trading. And I was my I had a trading partner. We were in the dean  on the first floor next in the borders with the World Trade Center. And we were one block away. We were walking to my home slash office and my friend asked me, hey, is the president coming into town today? That looks like Air Force One. And at that single moment, everybody in the streets almost like instinctively ducked, even though the plane was 600 feet higher. And we all just watched it like a split second later go straight into the building with our eyes, like not not on TV. Like later. Everybody saw it on TV. Nobody saw the crash on TV, but you see the fire and everything. But we saw the crash. Right. Then on the first plane and it it you know, then we didn't know what to do. So we we you know, my friend, your brain plays tricks on you when you see a plane crash or when this thing happens. And so I was convinced that it was a remote control accident, that somebody was just playing with a 747 and had crashed it into the World Trade Center by accident and that fortunately, it was too early for anyone to be there, even though it was like almost nine a.m.. So my brain was with what my friend was saying, no, no, no, we're being attacked. So we run to the fire station right next to my apartment and we say, can we help? And they thought was a bunch of fire suits, a suits. And and then they say, wait, wait, are you guys firemen? And we said, no, but we want to help. And they said, no, no, no. Only firemen. And so they all left. And we're just standing there. The fire station was empty. They all left for the World Trade Center. One hundred percent of them died. And we go up to my building and my apartment and, you know, a bunch of people are there. My I had two babies. They were like crying and everybody's crying. My business partner was crying and. Yeah. So then then the buildings fell. The black cloud, you know, surrounded us. And, you know, that was that was 9/11 was not 9/11 was much worse for so many other people. So I don't really know what I what happened to me pales in comparison. But essentially that day I went totally broke zero. And, you know, and afterwards just the combination of those events and going broke, I was like suicidally depressed and I figured I had this life insurance policy from the time when I had money and I figured my kids were just babies. They're not going to remember me, but they'll benefit from this life insurance policy. So I tried to figure out if I could kill myself without anybody realizing it was suicide because I didn't want the insurance policy to be nullified by suicide and I couldn't figure it out. So and so I left and it took me years to basically climb out of that hole. Like I eventually the house was just lost. I moved 80 miles north and into a tiny, tiny place and. Kind of had no money and just treaded water for a little while and I got little jobs writing here and there. And then I kind of figured some things out and started new businesses.

Aaron Berg [00:37:18] And what are you doing with the kids during this time that kids come with you 80 miles north of the Sierra?

James Altucher [00:37:24] Yeah. So the kids are with me. My wife's with me. And, you know, at this point, you know, it's one of these times when, you know, you find out where your real friends are and which is to say, I actually had zero friends at this point and nobody. And so there was I had no opportunities. Nobody to call. Nothing to do. And so I wrote some software to model the stock market. So I took every piece of stock market data since the end of World War Two. And I used I wrote some artificial intelligence programs to figure out patterns in the market where it was statistically reliable, that I could make trades given certain conditions and make money. They would be there. It was a high statistical probability that they would make money. So I started doing that and it worked really well and I turned that into a business. So other so essentially other billionaires or hundred millionaires would invest money with me to invest using this software, which was triggering signals every single day, like all day long. And at the same time, I finally put my writing to use. I was writing for the Financial Times, for The Wall Street Journal. I started writing books about investing. And so I had two separate careers going on, one investing and one writing. And then I combined them. I built a Web site that was like a social network for investing. I sold that four months after I started it. I sold it for 10 million and a year later. I was broke, dead broke again. And I asked that house that I was in. That time, I was I didn't know anything. I was like an idiot. Now, the second time. This second time. Yeah. By the way, I was skipping. That was the third time. But yes. OK. What was the second time? There's a 15 million loss in less than two months. Ten million, five, five months was the 15 million and then 10 million. Took me about a year. And then there was this time. Somehow it happened. I was part of a part owner or beneficiary of a drug rehab facility for teenagers. And I sold. I helped the real owner sell that for forty one million dollars. And I took a piece of that, which I immediately I had the IRS wrote me a letter in 2004 and they said, you know, Mr. Altucher it has come to our attention. You haven't paid your taxes in 17 years. And so I owed all the money I made from that drug rehab thing to the IRS. And I was broke again, which was in the millions. Yeah. And then as I was making a living from the hedge fund and the writing, I was making a good living. I was writing books. I had I had multiple, as they say, I had multiple sources of income. And I was doing good with investing at this point, but not enough to really create wealth. So that's why I started then this this sort of I called it a MySpace of finance because MySpace was big then and which is an odd story later, because then I became friends with Tom, who was the if you ever joined MySpace, your first friend would have been Tom. Right. And so I'm skipping ahead. But it's like twelve years later, I get this phone call and I pick it up and this guy says, This is Tom. And I'm like, Tom, who is this? I'm Tom on MySpace, Tom. And he said, I've been reading your books and your stuff. This is like in 2013, I'm skipping at about eight years and he's like, I don't have any. I was the guy who had 500 million friends and now I don't have any friends. But I like your book. So I wanted to call you and I found your number and he's like, let's hang out or something. And I just. And then literally, he would call me, like, every now and then and I would never pick up the phone again. When he called, I just.

Aaron Berg [00:41:18] You didn't want to talk to Tom because he was a MySpace nerd.

James Altucher [00:41:21] No, I just felt awkward about it. I just felt weird, like I didn't I don't know why I never picked up the phone again. You ever feel like just awkward talking to somebody?

Aaron Berg [00:41:29] Very rarely. But on occasion.

James Altucher [00:41:30] Yeah. I don't think I think it's probably very rare for you.

Aaron Berg [00:41:33] You saw 9/11 happen with your own eyes, right? Months later, we find out how it's caused.

James Altucher [00:41:41] Yes, so I was. I couldn't. So it's so obvious I couldn't sell my apartment because it was right next to 9/11. So this is one of the ways I went broke is that ultimately I couldn't pay the mortgage either. I couldn't afford anything. So I stopped paying the mortgage. So on and all the time. Could you imagine, like I had just seen this and like as a society, we saw I saw it with my eyes, saw the people jumping off. The building landing right in front of me and, you know, then lost my home, went broke and I was just scared all the time.

Aaron Berg [00:42:14] Finance attracts some really shady people because there's people that are looking to expand their wealth. And there's as good as you can be at it. It is a game, right. So you look at people that find the shady ways you had an experience with Bernie Madoff, who's a prime example.

James Altucher [00:42:34] So I was I had this I was running a what's called a hedge fund after I had started investing a little bit more successfully. And my next door neighbor says to me, hey, my boss would love to meet you. He also runs a hedge fund. Maybe he'll invest in your hedge fund. And so I go and visit him. He his boss, very nice guy. He gives me this tour around the facility and we sit down in his office and he's like, Okay, James, what do you want? And I said, well, I was hoping you could invest in my fund. And he said, James, you could have a job here anytime you want. If you just walked in here and told me any day, I would love to work here. You're hired. But reputation is everything. I have no idea where. And it's very important to us here. I have no idea where you're putting your money. If I give you money, I don't know if it's going to go into some criminal thing or not. And the last thing we need to see is the name is as our name. Bernard Madoff Securities, LLC on the front page of The New York Times. And so Bernie Madoff rejected me investing in me and I left his building was the lipstick building. I'm Fifty Third Street. I left his building really depressed. I was like, gosh, how am I ease that? This guy's a genius. And he has all these great returns. Everybody's invested in him and he won't even invest in me. And and I literally shut down my business because of Bernie Madoff. I figure I can't compete. And the competition's too strong. I shut I shut down my hedge fund. And that's when I started this this web. It's like MySpace for finance company.

Aaron Berg [00:44:07] So shady dealings made you a success in life,.

James Altucher [00:44:13] You know, being rejected by all the either either being incompetent or being rejected somehow has. Here is my one secret that actually finally let me turn the ship is that I finally said to myself, I am the stupidest person in every room I'm in. And then I only invest it in companies if everybody else was smarter than me. And so only then I started successfully making money and holding onto it because I would never make any decision about my money unless somebody a thousand times smarter than me was alongside me. So I would invest in a company only if, let's say, Peter Thiel was also investing in it side by side with me, because then I figured I'd never have to think about this again. Peter Thiel, the founder, PayPal, the first investor in Facebook. He's in this. I'm leaving it to him. And every deal I've done since then except buying a comedy club, I had the same strategy and it's always worked. And of course, the one time I don't use the strategy, it's the worst investment ever is buying a comedy club.

Aaron Berg [00:45:22] Let me ask you this to make millions and then lose millions. And the earlier thing that you mentioned was you had this early inkling towards spirituality. So do do these two things combine and contribute to your minimalism? Because somewhere it says that you only own fifteen things in order to practice minimalism. Is there truth to that?

James Altucher [00:45:47] Yeah. So. Well, no, I don't believe that was minimalism. I actually really don't. I'm a minimalist in the sense that I don't really like to own things. So so there was a period where I didn't want to own a house and I didn't want to rent an apartment. So I would just live from RBM Bita Araby and be I feel I, I got a friend of mine to throw out everything that was in my apartment. 40 years of junk in my apartment. Diploma's all the books I had written in different languages and you know, all my books and a comic book collection. I had all this stuff and I pay. I got this friend to it. Took her eight straight days with her whole family helping her. She threw out everything I owned, just threw it out or gave it away or kept. I don't even know what she did with it. And I came home from a trip and I had no place to go. My rent was over. I had no home. And so I just started live for two and a half years I just lived in Airbnbs and I would move every three days all around the country. And then. And then The New York Times heard about this somehow. I don't even really know how they heard about it. And so they did this whole profile in the Sunday fashion section, which I always remind my daughters of, that they can't talk to me about fashion because. The one on the front page of the fashion section in The New York Times and and I then air BMB, read it. And I spoke at the air being be open. I got to know all the founders of Araby and be Steven Spielberg's office calls me. I fly out to L.A. and they want their pitching shows to me about a guy who just lives in Araby and Bees and, you know, and that led to a whole bunch of stuff. And it was just that was just a crazy period, because part of the reason I did that was I was dating someone who was, let's just say, physically abusive. And so...

Aaron Berg [00:47:43] It was a pretty exact thing like it's not..

James Altucher [00:47:46] Yes, right. So she would shoot basically she'd smash like five computers in a row over me. And I was renting an apartment from this pop singer who called me up one day and said, what the hell is going on there? Why is everybody hearing so much noise that you're all the you know, the upstairs is upstairs and the downstairs. Keep hearing this woman screaming. And I'm like, Vanessa, you have to kick me out of your apartment. Just kick me out and I'll I'll take them. I'll take the deposit back, but kick me out as fast as possible. So she kicked me out. And I use that as an excuse to then say, hey, I got no place, I'm just going. And that's how I ended that relationship. And the apartment was gone. And then I, I wasn't a mentalist. I was just kind of on the run. It just airbed being all over the country. And and I and I liked it. I liked only having I. I made sure I never bought anything unless I threw something out of my carry on bags. I basically I like about a dozen or so items in my carry on bag four for two and half years. And that's how that's how I live until until I got into this apartment that I'm in right now.

Aaron Berg [00:48:59] There is this essential view of Jews as wanderer's and whether you know what or not, you've taken that on because you wander between professions, you wander between wealth and poverty, and you literally wander in terms of where you live, like where you're living now. You've been setup for a while, but it's been this bad ass journey of being a failure in school to being, you know, a titan of finance, to losing everything, repeating it. And it's basically like wash, rinse, repeat with you.

James Altucher [00:49:39] And again, I would say eventually I learned my mistakes in the sense that you could only lose all your money so many times before you start to self reflect and say, how could I have done this again? Like, there must be something really glaringly obvious. And so so I corrected course, fortunately. And I've done. Money has never been my goal otherwise. Trust me, I would not be performing up comedy five nights a week and owning a comedy club. Right. As you know, that is not the path to wealth.

Aaron Berg [00:50:11] Let's let's be there now. You. You own standup. New York, which is a comedy club on the Upper West Side in terms of the people that you bring in. There's there's a bad ass quality to it. I've been there. Roseanne Barr, after being canceled. Did her first live thing there. You've had other comics that have been canceled. Now you're not in charge of booking. But there's something about you that goes into that club. And I know everybody at that club. Yeah. No, I think owe me. Tell me why you're so drawn to standup, why you want to be good at it and and why you continue to bring in these habitual line steppers.

James Altucher [00:50:54] Well, when I was at HBO, I worked a little bit with HBO comedy. I was constantly going to all the comedy clubs back in the 90s. I would go out to the Aspen Comedy Festival. I would go. I was just I was really into the subculture, but I was terrified to actually do standup onstage. And so finally in 2015, I tried it a couple times and I got obsessed and maybe maybe I didn't get obsessed till about 2016, but literally I got obsessed. And it's out of all the skills I've had to learn, whether it was entrepreneurship, writing, computers, chess, investing, comedy is by standup comedy specifically is by far the hardest skill I've had to learn. And it is it is a difficult skill. And so and this is why I stopped doing the NBN BS is that standup? New York at the time was the only club that would have me perform there. So and the Upper West Side, there were no RBM BS available. There was like some laws passed. And so I finally rented an apartment across the street from the club so I would have it. And then and then I was kind of worried. It is not necessarily the worry wasn't necessarily rational. It's kind of. They were gonna go out of business, so I bought essentially half the club. So that did to make sure they wouldn't go out of business.

Aaron Berg [00:52:11] I don't know. I don't want this club to go because the apartment I'm renting was right.

James Altucher [00:52:16] I didn't want to have to, like, travel all the way down to, like, the grisly pear or whatever, which I've done many times as well, or whatever. Any of these clubs, you know, pretty much the only one is the Comedy Cellar. I haven't formed that, although I've been on their podcast and so on. But yeah, I got obsessed. And then I've now traveled all over the country. I've traveled to other countries doing standup right before this pandemic, right before this lockdown, Tony was and I went to five cities in the Netherlands to perform. So it's it's been it's been a ride. And and I and I'm still at the beginning of it. It's it's it's such a fascinating skill.

Aaron Berg [00:52:55] You get in trouble sometimes and it's not your stand that does that. Sometimes your writing gets you in trouble because of your opinions and because you think outside the box you shared with me the fact that you were getting numerous death threats per day. Tell me the most recent experience and how a bad ass like you deal with stuff like that.

James Altucher [00:53:22] Well, it's probably everyday anyway, because if you have an opinion right now in life, there's gonna be half the world will like you and half the world will hate you. And if you have opinions. But you. But so my opinions are on one side and so on. My opinions might be on another side. Like just recently I made the comment that it seems like everyone who's for a lockdown seems to be either rich or has a steady paycheck. And yet people who want the economy's open up, they're hungry and they're starving. And I'm you know, I volunteer at a church and a food line and I see them on these lines like people I know who who you know, and we all know people, employees at all these clubs and employees at the restaurants. I'm a I'm a I'm a community business owner now. So I know all the people and all the different businesses. Yes. So much suffering happening. And I and I couldn't. And so I would say, like, we should, you know, we should open up the economy. And I didn't think it was political. And suddenly, like, everybody's like, oh, you know, people sending me emails, people tweeting at me, people, you know, stopping me on the street. People just say, like, oh, man, I hope you die rather than get your stock market profits. I'm not even invested in the stock market. And so, you know, but a few years ago, I was on the Bitcoin stuff, so I was a real big advocate for Bitcoin and people who were also advocates for Bitcoin. They hated me because I was advertising. I was selling a Bitcoin newsletter to help people avoid scams. And people who were really into Bitcoin were it were basically saying all day long, this guy should just die. I can't stand this guy. And I got one email, you know, oh, this is on a different topic. I was I thought I thought all colleges should shut down. And so I got an email from a guy and said, you know, I want to if I saw you, I would slice you up and put you through a wheat thresher, which I don't even know what a wheat thresher was. And it turns out this guy was a student at Brown University. So I called the Brown University like head of security. And he and he's like, oh, yeah, we know we know this guy. He's threatened a librarian before.

Aaron Berg [00:55:38] And he does not like people with glasses. James Right.

James Altucher [00:55:43] Or Jews maybe. I don't know. And I said, well, don't you think you should do something about it? And he's like, look, I'll do whatever you want. He's a senior. He's about to graduate. You really want to ruin this guy's career? And I'm like, I don't know. I kind of do. And he's like, come on, you really. And so I'm basically talking out of, like, doing anything serious. But one time so many people are angry at me on Twitter and I use sometimes you get sucked into it. It was like 2:00 in the morning. And I tweeted out my phone number and I said, if anyone has a problem with me, call me right now. And so for the next twelve hours, people were calling me from all over the world and they would be surprised. I actually picked up the phone and talked to them. And then everybody was when they talked to you. People are okay. But it's just the kind of mask of social media and the anonymity often that's there and the distance is people get you have violent tendencies.

Aaron Berg [00:56:37] You showed me like literal text from people where that one guy said, oh, yeah, yeah, there is no other choice for me but to find you and kill you.

James Altucher [00:56:47] Yeah. And he's a Canadian, by the way. So he's a Canadian. I think that's the only thing that helps me is that stop immigration from candidates, a bunch of murderers there.

Aaron Berg [00:56:57] I I'm a very nice person and I was able to come here.

James Altucher [00:57:01] Yeah. He said, he said I was a Zionist psychopath. And he accused me of planting a chip in his brain and I his blog, his Web site was called James Alta Char is a lying Zionist psychopath. And that's the title of his Web site. That's his domain name.

Aaron Berg [00:57:18] Well, if you hang on one second, we are scaping in right now. That guy to chat with you.

James Altucher [00:57:24] Alright, bring him on.

Aaron Berg [00:57:28] Joking. So your advice to Jews that feel like they're young, they're covered in acne, they have glasses, they have disheveled hair. They're never going to be anything. What would be your advice to those young Jews that want to be a success like you are.

James Altucher [00:57:47] I do have concrete advice and it's going to sound simplistic and corny, but it's get a waiter's pad and every day start writing 10 ideas a day. If every single day the ideas are a muscle and if you don't use that muscle, just like you know, Aaron, let me ask you, if you didn't work out every day, how many days would it take before your muscles would shrivel up?

Aaron Berg [00:58:14] Well, I'm in fantastic shape, so probably at least 60 to 90 days.

James Altucher [00:58:19] OK, so if you don't use your idea muscle for 60 to 90 days and this applies to the entire universe, your idea of muscle will shrivel up and disappear. And that's, by the way, the average person. So every day since I had this realization, I write down 10 ideas a day. And by the way, that also means I try to take care of myself or else I won't be creative. I try to be around people who I like as opposed to people I hate, or else I won't be creative. But my ideas, your idea. Muscle turns into like a super muscle like like you get you get jacked with the idea muscle. And I still I write 10 ideas every day and it's amazing the results. Like I wrote an idealist the other day, TV shows that I would pitch to Disney because little kids would like them. And so I made a list of of 10 TV show ideas. I just sent it cold to Disney. And they responded and I had a meeting with Disney yesterday to go over my TV show ideas. So every day something happens because of this one technique that I have never stopped doing in the past, like 12 years.

James Altucher [00:59:29] It's amazing. And then the other advice is always be the stupidest person in the room.

Aaron Berg [00:59:33] There you have it. James Alter, Jr., thank you for being a bad ass Jew. Thank you for taking time to be with us.

James Altucher [00:59:39] Thank you for inviting me.