How to Succeed with Zero Qualifications

25:42And then you'll start to realize, oh, this is what I was really aiming for. This is now shaping up to look like I'm aiming to not have a TV show, but I'm starting a company. Or another example being, one time I had regular meetings with the CEO of a company that I was doing some work with. And he would say, so what's going on today? And I told him, well, I have this idea for a website that's social media combined with finance. and he's like, oh, this is a great idea. We should do it together. And I said, actually, Tom, I'm just about done with the site. Like you could take a look at it and maybe we could work out a deal, but I'm almost done.

26:21And he's like, oh yeah, well, why are you doing this without us? Like, let's, of course, let's, well, let me take a look at it. So he said, let's meet in a week and I'll show you what I have. So I went home that day, I called up a bunch of programmers that I found on freelance.com, programmers in India. And I said, just give me a sketch of, I'm going to describe all the pages of this website. They give me like a sketch of it back. And I get a sketch of an entire completed website. I show them to Tom, the CEO of this company. And he's like, how could you be doing? Let's totally partner on this.

26:51And I said, Tom, I'm already done. How am I going to partner? You know, so I was firing before I was aiming. And it ended up being, we started the website. We owned it 50-50 together. They drove traffic and put advertising on every page of my site. Once it was finished two, three months later. And then eventually they bought the company for$10 million. So, you know, that was a ready, fire, aim approach. I love hearing this stuff, James. I really do. And for everyone out there, for context, this is the third time that I've moderated a James Altucher panel or talk. And I really feel, James, that I'm getting to know you really well.

27:24And the reason is simple. You have an internal integrity and an internal consistency to everything that I've talked and interviewed with you about in the last year, which is you truly do live out this. I've never had qualifications for anything I've done. You truly live out this assertiveness, this initiativeness, and every story that you've told to me over the last months have been stories of, I tried it. I did it. I didn't have any preconceived notion of what the outcome should be, right? But you ooze an assertive personality of where, don't take this the wrong way, where it doesn't seem like you consider risk in your decision-making matrix.

28:11Is that fair? That is fair because, again, I do minimize the risk by, okay, I didn't make the website before I knew, oh, this is somebody I can make a deal with and he's going to probably like this idea. And I didn't start the website really until then. So, you know, that was a key thing. I do try to minimize the risk. And there's risks not only to money, but to time. But I'll also say, if that idea didn't work out, no big deal. By the way, that was the 10th meeting in a row with different companies I had where all my ideas were kind of rejected until that 10th one. The first nine, oh, I don't even think about them anymore.

28:51The 10th one, I sold for$10 million. So it makes a difference. We have a very trackable theme in our conversation already. We started off with a depressing idea of losing millions of dollars and how do we get out of this? and the idea is action and discipline to consistent action and discipline to continue to act even when the future is unknown and engaging and say, hey, can I be useful here? And so I have a couple of questions, one from the audience or two from the audience. The first is this, is what trait you've interviewed so many people, you've met hundreds of thousands of people. What's the trait that you've seen other than discipline because we've talked about that here.

29:28What trait have you seen other than discipline in a person that you've interviewed that tells you that they're going to win? What personality trait or characteristic, as you've interviewed thousands of people, that tells you that they are going to win? I'm curious. It's a great question because there's not just one, but that makes it hard to come up with an answer. I will say, and I'm thinking about a few people in particular that are not too old, not too young, where I can already see they've got the first stages of success, but they're going to go on to be even much more successful than they are now.

30:02And I would say one is optimism. These people have a vision of the world that is optimistic. And they have a vision for you that is optimistic. If you say to them, what should I do next? They will say instantly, well, obviously you're doing this, this, this. It seems like the blue sky in front of you if you do this. And they're optimistic for you, for the people they interact with. They are optimistic for those people. And of course they are for themselves. So, and again, you don't have to be stupidly optimistic. If you're in a burning building, you don't say, well, I'm just going to sit here because the fire is going to go out.

30:39You're optimistic that you can get out alive. And, you know, that's, you have to, it has to be rationally optimistic. And then the other thing is they're very creative. And again, creativity, people think creativity is like something you're born with, or it's like a talent. I always wonder what the relationship is between talent and skill in any endeavor. And whether it's business or ping pong or chess or writing or whatever, but developing, I think talent is about being obsessed about something. The talent and obsession are the same thing. And then really working on developing the skill of creativity in this particular case of who do I think is going to be successful?

31:22Optimism first, but then developing the skill of creativity. And like we discussed earlier, it could be through that, you know, writing those 10 ideas a day down. That's very important. Also, imagine your body, your body, when let's say it's clogged for some reason, like you're eating junk food all the time, or you're, you know, drinking a lot, or you're not in good shape for some, somehow you're going to, your body's going to get clogged up and eventually it's going to have a heart attack because it's not healthy anymore. Now imagine you have four bodies that kind of in a conceptual way sit or occupy the same space.

32:01You have your physical body where we just talked about. You have an emotional body. So like that's your relationships, your emotions. So if you're angry all the time, you're going to clog up that emotional body and you'll have sort of the equivalent of an emotional heart attack. So if you're angry all the time, if you're arguing with your friends or your spouse or you're pessimistic all the time, then there's the mental body, which if you're constantly not creative, your mental body gets clogged up with all those potential ideas that could just never get out. And then there's the spiritual body, which is, I don't mean this in a religious sense.

32:34I mean, just surrendering to what you can't control. Like if you're always obsessed with like, oh, I got to control the weather today or else today's a bad day. You're not going to be a happy person. You're not going to be a spiritual person. And if it's like, oh, it's raining and I was going to go hiking. Okay, what do I do now? That's like a spiritual way of looking at things. So these four bodies, they've got to be clean. So you don't have a heart attack in any one of them. And they all kind of communicate with each other. That's what makes success. You don't have to be perfect at anything.

33:04Of course, you're going to have some emotional problems, some mental problems, some physical problems, you know, but just as clean as you could possibly make it. You need that to succeed. You can't succeed and come up with great new ideas if you're sick in bed, if you're angry with your spouse, if you're not working on your idea muscle, if you're trying to control things that are out of your control. You're just gonna be too quote unquote sick in one of these bodies. You won't be able to take that next step and continue. And that's really important. I love this. I think that what you're speaking to is an internal integrity and internal consistency across all of these disciplines of life.

33:41If you're sick in one area, it affects everything because we're a complex system is everything is interconnected yeah and i'll give you a very specific example i was just i play chess i play in chess tournaments you i saw you won i saw you won recently yeah so what happened was i stopped playing for 27 years and i recently started back up again and i wanted to see can i get as good as i was when i was younger this weekend i won the georgia's senior state championship so people over age 50 i won the championship, which means I get to represent Georgia in the national U S senior championship. And what was the key to winning that tournament?

34:21I will tell you the most important thing that allowed me to win was the fact that I really focused on sleeping eight hours a day, every day last week, without that, I would not have won. And with that, I'm probably the only person in that tournament who slept a solid eight hours a day. And I won, you know, I'm guessing about if I was the only person. But making sure my physical energy was there was important. And did you know that this was something that you needed to discipline yourself? Absolutely. On tournaments, when I don't sleep, I do poorly. And sometimes the adrenaline of the middle of a tournament is very difficult.

34:58So I had to plan, how was I going to sleep on the in-between day in the tournament? Because I knew my adrenaline would be spiking so much, it would be really hard for me to sleep. So I had to plan that out in advance. And of course, I did all the mental stuff. I have a coach. I worked with the coach throughout the week. I did all the emotional stuff. I made sure anybody, any situation I'm in emotionally, I'm just going to clear the deck, make sure it's all okay. Spiritually, I had to come to the grips with the fact that, you know, I might not win this tournament, but I always tell myself if I lose, maybe I made someone else's life happier because he beat me.

35:34And so that's how I tried to overcome the fear of losing, which is very difficult. And all these things I had to have together to win this tournament. Plus, of course, a little bit of luck. But, you know, again, you create your own luck. Yes, I think luck. I don't believe in luck. I only believe in probabilities is the semantics that I like to use. I had to increase my probabilities as much as possible. So I'm a data scientist. That rings true for my mental models. I don't see luck as a measure or even close to a tangible idea that we can grab a hold of and measure. But probabilities, we can. I'm always about increasing probabilities, increasing the chances of.

36:13And I think preparation is kind of what we're talking about here. Preparation is a very big part of that. But actually, I like the idea of looking at it in probabilities. Like, let's say I didn't sleep well. Let's say I slept six hours a night on average the week before. Okay, so I know from statistics that maybe there might be a one in five chance I'm going to lose simply because I didn't have good sleep the week before. Let's say I didn't prepare all the right, you know, what's called openings or strategies. If I didn't prepare those, then there might be a one in five chance I might lose a game because of those.

36:45And so you can start to work out how you increase your odds of winning by just having these positive habits and positive activities beforehand. That's exactly it. And that in our opening talk this morning for the Fullstack Interact conference, that was one of the core things that I wanted the audience to remember is that we are increasing the chances of opportunities to arise by smashing ourselves against other people and networking intentionally. The point is to come to Fullstack, learn from amazing speakers and industry experts, but also get out of that shell as Bob was talking about in our last panel.

37:20Get out of your shell, network intentionally, because you never know what lies on the end of the other conversation, right? And by the way, Bob made a good point. He said, it's hard to be an introvert and do this. If you're an introvert, fake being an extrovert. That's what I'm thinking. And I'm a huge, huge, huge introvert. sometimes you know my wife will throw a party every 15 20 minutes i've got to go just into another room and just sit by myself for a little while or if we go out and hang out with friends when we get back i've got to just go in a room and sit by myself like i get too overwhelmed and it takes a lot of energy for me to to socialize but i find ways around it i i choose myself to be it's not like I'm shy.

38:09Introverts aren't shy. They just lose energy when they socialize and extroverts gain energy when they socialize. An extrovert might be shy and an introvert might not be shy at all, but there's still this physical reaction to socializing, whether you're an introvert or extrovert. So I, for many years, I performed standup comedy almost every single night. Am I a great comedian? Probably not, but I did it every night for maybe five, six years. and to the point I own my own stand-up comedy club in New York City. Wow. Which, by the way, I do not recommend for any investor. It's a horrible idea. I didn't know this.

38:45This is awesome. But this allows me to, when I need to turn it on, I can turn it on. I don't need to fake being an extrovert. I could just turn on this skill set I developed. I love it. And I think Bob used terse terms there, just fake it, guys. And the way that I would contextualize that is, you must try. yeah he didn't mean it in a negative way you know again a lot of people are funny it takes a different skill to go up on stage in front of a bunch of drunk norwegians and make them laugh and and what do you do then if they are booing you have to develop an incredible range of skills to do stand-up comedy decently and i would say i got to the level after five or six years i got to the level where i was probably a little higher than decent you know enough where i could tour around and other comedy clubs wanted me to perform.

39:34I went to other countries and performed and so on. It was very hard. You have to learn how to work with the crowd. You have to learn how to deal with rejection. You have to write well. You have to be funny. You have to know how to use your vocal cords and use the mic correctly and use the stage correctly. You have to be so sharp and quick-witted too, right? I mean, your mental acuity and your mental agility has to, I mean, I would assume for, I'm playing on what you've told me before, I would assume you needed a full night's rest before you did stand-up comedy. Yeah, definitely. I would need to rest during the day.

40:06And then what I would do is watch comedy as much as I could during the day to kind of get me into the physicality of it. Like watch other comedians that were very physical and see how they move and learn from that and so on. But of course, I had other things to do. Like we all have work we do during the day. so I'd have to sleep well, but then make sure I maximize my downtime so I conserve energy during the day. Because then I'd be up late at night doing comedy, and I'm not a late-night person. I have to be that guy, and I'm going to be that guy. I'm going to pull on this string. I want to know why James Altucher, the comedian, didn't last.

40:45Tell me two things, James. Number one, what was the curiosity that you had to itch to get into comedy and stand-up. And number two, what was the reason why he left?

41:13Well, I loved it. I've always loved stand-up comedy. Love, love, love it. I mean, I was obsessed. and back in the 90s, I even did the website for the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen, Colorado. I did that three years in a row, and I knew who all the comedians were. I had a lot of comedians on my podcast, and I just love dissecting the skills because someone like Louis C.K. might have different skills than Chris Rock, might have different skills than Dave Chappelle. They're all very different comedians, or George Carlin, or Sarah Silverman, or Amy Schumer. They're all very different, have different types of styles.

41:50And I just love understanding the skill acquisition. They might be talented or they might not. Many of them are not talented, but they spent years. You don't start to hear the name of a comedian until at least year 10 of them doing it. And they don't start to become famous until at least year 15 to 20. I mean, Louis C.K. probably got known around year 25 that he was doing it. So it's a very hard set of skills to acquire. and I stopped doing it simply because there was a pandemic. And then I stopped doing it enough that I kind of said, oh, you know, there could be a pandemic and I'm going to go back to my first love, which was chess, and, you know, get that skill back.

42:31I'm going to share something here. You touched on a personal, I guess, moment, personal thing in my bone, I guess, is how I want to say it. I've always been so curious of getting into comedy and for the exact same reasons that you did, which is I want to understand the means, the method. I want to understand how these guys are able to move so quickly mentally and be able to respond so quickly based on audience engagement and feedback and to be able to create a narrative. Like Dave Chappelle is a master of his style of comedy. He is able to string you along for 27 minutes and you have not a bored second in the 27-minute narrative.

43:16And it takes him 27 minutes to get to the hook or whatever, to the drop, right? And you're just, you're dying because it all made sense. And in some of his shows, this is my engineering mechanical analysis of, he will go the entire routine only for an hour and a half and finally get to the end of the joke that he said. Do you remember that stand-up where he said, guys, I have this fishbowl with all these like butt ends of a joke. And I just know that I'm able to do it. And the one that I pulled out from this one is like, it's going to be, we're going to have to bleep this out. But I think it was like puncher in the.

43:52Yes. Yes. I know exactly the one you're talking about. We're going to bleep it out, guys. No worries. But for all of you guys here live, we won't say the actual word, but then he finally did get back. Right when you thought you, the audience even had forgotten what his initial punchline was going to be and or what he was talking about. And then he gets right back to it. Another time he did that was his special where he's going to tell, I'm going to tell you about the four times I met OJ Simpson. All the way at the end of the special, he told a bunch of stories about OJ Simpson. It turned out to be three.

44:21He leaves the stage. It's over. And then he comes like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I forgot to tell you about the fourth time I met OJ Simpson. And it was just perfect. A master at his craft. I love it. So you're speaking to my heart here, James. Like for me, I've always been curious about getting into comedy. not because I think I'm good at it, but because of the engineer and the ingenuity behind it. Well, here's something you could, one could try is so when I was trying to get good, I didn't want to perform at a comedy club and waste anybody's time. But what I would do is I would go in a subway car and try to do comedy there because it's hard because that audience on rush hour, on the New York city subway, they do not want to be told jokes by you.

45:04Like it is the worst audience. And so that was my kind of training ground when I first got started. And it was difficult, but I chose myself to do it. Why not? I love it. I love the assertiveness. I love the model that you ooze to our audience here is that we must try. We must try. We must try. I've got a couple of questions for us from the audience here. And it actually is contextually relative. I think I already know the answer because we had a panel, which was awesome. Entrepreneurship in 2025. five for everyone out there. Make sure that you go see that replay. We had Bob Bernton Collins and James Altucher there.

45:40And the question is when reaching out to build a meaningful business connection, what key qualities should one embody to make a lasting and positive impression? I'm assuming it's obsession, but I'm going to give you James the opportunity to answer when reaching out to build a meaningful business connection. What key qualities should one and body to make a lasting and positive impression on you? I think, yes, obsession, but even more important is usefulness. You've got to be useful. You can't say, for instance, look, we all started this way and we all end this way in the sense that I would write to people sometimes and say, hey, can I buy you a lunch and pick your brain?

46:23And now I see the same thing happen. People write me, oh, can I buy you a lunch? just talk to you and pick your brain. That's not useful. You just gave me a homework assignment and I would do this to other, I would write to Warren Buffett and say, hey, can I buy you a cup of coffee? Warren Buffett's got$150 billion. He doesn't need me to buy him a cup of coffee. So I just gave him a homework assignment or he's going to ignore me, which is what 99 % of those types of emails should be ignored. You have to be useful to someone right from the beginning. You have to kind of understand, do your research, understand what a person's pain points are, and simply be useful.

47:01Or listen to someone, if you have the opportunity, and figure out ways to be useful. Being useful is the magic formula for building a connection. My goodness, I wrote this down. I want to repeat it because I think it's so important. 99.99999 % of every single email that I receive when it comes from a VC context, next asking for money, or even a LinkedIn connection, they are giving me a daggone bloody homework assignment, James. They're telling me to do more work. I don't want to do more work. Give me everything so I can make a very... We were talking to our last panel about how lazy you like to be.

47:39I'm lazy. I'm a venture capitalist, man. Give me everything I need so I can make an informed decision and then I can do it, right? And so don't give people homework assignments. I love this. And be exceptionally useful. And I'll give you an example. So I wrote to amazon.com. You know, I was, I was familiar with their self-publishing arm. This is like in 2012, 2013, when they were first starting this up. And so I wrote to the head of that organization and I wrote, here's 10 ideas I think could improve this. You know, I use your platform. Here's 10 ideas that in my experience you could do that improve the platform.

48:16And I said, you don't have to write back, just giving you these ideas. Enjoy. and then they wrote back and said hey you know we love this list if you're ever in seattle we'd love to show you what we're doing and get your feedback well i had never been to seattle before in my life but i said hey it just turns out i'm going to be in seattle next week this is the ready fire aim and and so i went out to seattle just you know i wasn't going to be out there but i went out because of their email and two days i spent touring around their whole facility they met everybody. They showed me everything that was going on.

48:51We went out to dinner. We had a lot of fun. And of course, when I then self-published books later, I had people to call to help me market the books and stuff. And what goes around comes around. I love it that you are a commensurate networker. How do you make these decisions? Because some people would say the Ready, Fire, Aim is just way too wild, wild west. How do you make decisions on which things to execute on? Well, okay. In that one, again, the power of laziness is very important. I didn't actually implement any of the ideas. I just came up with a waiter's pad. I wrote down 10 ideas for Amazon and I emailed it with no expectation.

49:33Then they wrote back and said, hey, this is good. Let us know if you're ever in town. So that's an easy decision. I would love to meet Amazon. So of course, I'm going to just book. I'm going to cancel everything and book a trip to Seattle. to meet the heads of their self-publishing division. They didn't know who I was. And they said, oh yeah, just stop by anytime. Like they didn't think I was gonna respond instantly and say, oh, it just so happens I'm Seattle next week. So of course they're meeting me now. These were easy decisions to make. I didn't have to do anything. They weren't hard decisions.

50:03I love it. We got a couple of questions from the audience. Here's to a Q &A. How do you know when to double down on an idea versus let it go and move on to the next one? Not at the beginning of an idea, but after you've already started executing and you know maybe you make a website that you think is going to be very popular and people are using it but it's not getting the kind of excitement that you need so you throw more ideas into it and you put a lot of time into it but it's getting used but it's not going viral or whatever it is you know i think that's when it's difficult to decide well i don't know what to do but i think things that you're excited about The things that someone is excited about is worth doubling down.

50:48It might be you or it might be your users. But if both you or your users are not excited, I think, of course, some magical thing could happen and then some pivot could happen and all of a sudden everybody's excited and it goes viral. But I think if things feel like they're plateauing, unless you love it, then you should probably not double down. And if you love it or if someone else loves it, then you should probably double down. So like an example might be something like, you know, Instagram, right? So Instagram, if I remember correctly, it was a photo sharing app and, but there was other photo sharing apps like Flickr and Photo Shutter or whatever.

51:27But then they added filters. They added, they did one, but nobody was getting excited about Instagram. So they added one new feature, this filters where you could look a little better on a photo and suddenly, and then they also had the social media aspects like a feed. and suddenly it spread like wildfire. So somebody had to love it enough to try that last pivot and then they knew, okay, this is what we're doing. But otherwise they were probably just going to give up. They should give up. If the last pivot they wanted to do didn't work, then just give up. What I loved about this question is I actually had this question happen just a couple of weeks ago with a young entrepreneur that I was interviewing for asking for money.

52:07He was asking for money and he was asking the same idea. He's like, how do I know if I need to persevere on this? And I said, are you passionate about it? He's like, yes. I was like, do you have rabid, raving fans that love this idea? And he looked at me and he said, no. I was like, well, then you're the only one that's passionate about it, bro. Right? There might be a permutation of your product idea that can move into an industry or a market space where there are fans and people who really want this product idea, but you're not wrong. There needs to be a match between the passion of the operator and the appetite of the market.

52:44Right. The passion of the operator might mean that they have that one more idea for a pivot or for a feature that they could add because they would love to see that feature. They can't just say, oh, I'm going to add AI to this and then the AI is going to make everyone love it. No, because every website's doing that. You have to make a site that you will passionately use. And if one more feature is involved, okay, do that. But if still nobody really cares or usage is not really, you know, you need to make something that people share. And if they don't, if people aren't sharing it, it means the product is okay, but not good enough.

53:20And you should just stop it unless you love it. Like, for instance, your podcast might not be growing, but if you love interviewing the people you're interviewing, keep doing your podcast. There's multiple reasons to do a podcast. Viralness is only one of those reasons to do a podcast. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And frankly, I think you and I could probably come up with a plethora of examples of this where podcasters, the story, the origin story is always, I loved talking to people, so I just did the thing, and people kept showing up, and now I'm big. Yeah. You know, like your Lex Friedman, right?

53:55I mean, Lex Friedman, let's be honest, watching him is probably as much fun as watching paint dry. In many cases, his monotone engagement is quite natural for him. I love it, but daggum it, brother. but there's not there's there's there's more than an automaton in there i'll give you a really good example too dan carlin is the host of hardcore history hardcore history only comes out like once every couple months but he was so obsessed and loved history particularly military history like like ancient roman history ancient ancient peloponnesian military history he knew his stuff and so his mom said to him one day you should do a podcast about this and he's like mom i have no I'm not a historian.

54:33I didn't get a PhD in any of this. I just love this stuff. I don't know any, I'm not a professional historian. And she's like, oh, I didn't know you needed to have a PhD to do a podcast. So he started doing his podcast. He did it on his own schedule. No one said you got to do it three times a week, every Monday. Just did it on his own schedule. Love the topics. And he was so knowledgeable and he taught so well, people would share it. You got to listen to this about Roman, the Roman Spartacus war or whatever. And now he makes a living, as a basically podcast historian. Yeah, absolutely. And he did what he was passionate about and had a discipline to keep doing it.

55:10Yeah. I got two questions. It says, when you have no money, no audience and no leverage, what's the one move people can still make? Well, everybody starts off with no money, no audience. That's what I was going to say. That's what I was thinking. I was like, brother, join the club. Yeah, I can't think of any situation. you got to start somewhere but i would say you know find the thing that you're passionate about that you know that you're so passionate you know more than just about anybody else and you're able to express that vision you have an ability to communicate and then just start communicating answer questions on quora post on linkedin make threads on twitter put entire blog posts on your Facebook feed, on your status update, start a podcast, figure out more and more ways to communicate and you will find that audience and your knowledge also will increase as you're doing the research to communicate these messages and ideas.

56:10And then you can say, well, what if I'm not passionate about anything? That's a problem, but okay, start off, go to a bookstore, see which section in the bookstore you wouldn't mind buying and reading every single book in that section. Probably that's a clue as to what you're passionate about. And then by the way, read every single book in that section. You know, when I was starting to get interested, I didn't have any finance background at all. And I wanted to start, but then eventually a year or so after I became passionate about it, I started a hedge fund. I didn't have an MBA. I didn't work at Goldman Sachs.

56:42I didn't work at any hedge fund. I had no experience at all in finance. I read every book I could possibly find every single book. And I wrote software that modeled the markets. I pitched ideas for hedge funds to different people. And then ultimately I became so knowledgeable. Jim Kramer, who started the street.com here's 10 ideas for articles you should write. And then boom, he wrote back and said, these are such good ideas. Why don't you write these ideas? So now I'm a writer about finance. And then I was pitching different hedge fund managers. Here's the software package. that could help your particular approach to investing.

57:21Oh, why don't you invest this? We'll give you some money. So suddenly I started a hedge fund and I was a contributor on CNBC, writing for the Financial Times, writing for the street.com. I built a career out of nothing. I had no audience, no anything. But my writing was unique because I had spent four failed years trying to write a novel. So my writing was a little unique and I built suddenly an audience. I love it. I love it. If there's any one thing that we as listeners to this amazing talk here is the perseverance and the determination to just not quit. I mean, isn't that what our dads told us when we were six years old?

57:57Don't quit. Well, sometimes you do quit though, right? Like if it's not working, you're not passionate about it. Fair enough. You quit on that thing, but you don't quit moving. You don't quit executing. That's right. Trying is the kind of the whole idea. I want to finalize with a potentially hairy and prickly topic that was brought up that we decided to self-censor in our last panel at the Full Stack Interact conference at FSBB.io. And this was brought up by your colleagues, Tim Collins and Bob Byrne, in a kind of a snarky way. And the question was, is college a scam? Well, it was actually said more in a statement.

58:33College is a scam. And I decided that we probably shouldn't start off the conversation last session with such a prickly topic. but I'm going to throw it onto you now here, James. Is college today in 2025 a scam? Absolutely. And now I understand all the arguments against this point of view, but let's just break it down. First off, college tuitions have increased faster than inflation every year since 1977. So, and I'm not saying on average, they increased more than inflation. They increased more than inflation every single year. So that's, there's no other product like that. You wouldn't buy a product that increases so much faster than inflation.

59:14It doesn't even make sense. The reason it increased so much is like an economics thing is that, oh, the government is backing student loans. So universities know no matter what, they're going to get paid. So yes, of course they would just, they would inflate prices. They would just increase it as much as they can. And since the 18 year olds who are applying for these student loans don't have risk assessment abilities yet. Like that literally that part of their brain is not fully developed to assess risk. Of course, I'll take a loan and I'm going to make so much money. I'm going to pay it back.

59:45So, which is why we're seeing student loan defaults like through the roof. So they were basically getting money for free to go to college and the universities are getting paid no matter what. So they could increase the tuitions. So, and there was this whole marketing, Oh, go to university instead of learning a trade, which by the way is a thousand times more useful than, And, you know, anything with the word that ends in the word studies is just like a waste of time. So like any major that you do that, oh, you know, I'm not going to make fun of any one specific major. But if it has the word studies in it, you've wasted your time.

1:00:17The other thing is... Wait, you're saying that my underwater basket weave in feminism studies is not valid? That might be the only one that is valid because everybody wants a basket that's been weaved underwater. But the studies part ruined it. So the other thing is, is that what does college actually get you? Well, one thing is you've just spent four years. Well, the average college student goes to college for five years. You've just spent five years of your life studying something. Now imagine if at the age of 18, you studied on your own, but also started a business. It doesn't matter what business it is.

1:00:52Let's say you started a door-to-door selling Bitcoin business. I don't know, something stupid. it. And you're still going to get so much more valuable experience about business, about selling, about interacting with people, about developing a product, about executing. In college, you could read the books without a professor telling you, you need to read these books. You could also read books in your spare time. You don't need a test to test your knowledge. You're not going to remember anything you're tested on anyway, unless you're passionate about it. I only remember the things I was passionate about.

1:01:23So you could learn more, not going to college, and at the same time, not Let's waste those five years by just going to class. You could be starting businesses. You could be starting on a career. When I first wrote this in 2005, people just still didn't really understand this concept. But now people kind of understand, okay, college is a choice, but there are other viable choices. And sure, you might have a fun time in college. But if you want to maybe start a business, I would say get the five-year head start of not going to college and start then. I wish I had done that. I regret going to college.

1:01:54I was telling a story to you earlier before this. I went undergrad computer science at a top school. I went to graduate school computer science at a top, top school, perhaps the number one school for like AI and computer science and so on. When I took my first job, that job at HBO, I was so bad at programming. They actually sent me to remedial programming classes. Like I was embarrassed because I was like this big, you know, academically trained programmer. And I just couldn't function at the job until I took remedial classes. Seems like the piece of paper and the theoretical learning in university may not be commensurate with the applicable skills that are necessary in today's workforce.

1:02:37And so I think - That's a very good, concise way of putting it. Well, see, that's the comedian in me. I just made that up. Imagine if I could make you laugh with my wittiness. That would be money. First, you have to make me think what you did. We'll do it. Well, thank you so much, James Altucher. This is the Full Stack Interact, the James Altucher Show. We're glad that you guys were here and we could take over the James Altucher podcast for this episode. James, it has been a pleasure. For everyone else, thank you so much. See you guys.

1:03:15Thank you.