--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today's guest, I couldn't be more excited to share with you. Some of you may know his work, some of you may listen to his podcast—millions of people do. But if you haven't, it's James Altucher.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: James is a true renaissance man. What I mean by that is, if you've ever listened to his show, he goes all different places. He produces The James Altucher Show. He's written 20 plus books, two of which are two of my favorite books in relation to life and business. The first one, back in 2012 or 2013, was *Choose Yourself*—absolute must purchase. Go to Amazon right now. And his latest book, *Skip the Line*, and he's had a bunch in there. *The Power of No* was another really good one. But his most recent book, *Skip the Line*, is why we had him on to talk specifically about. But you can't go wrong with any of his past written work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And then his podcast is just tremendous. The people that he's exposed me to. When I first got into taking cold showers, it's because I heard Aubrey Marcus on James' show. He's had Steven Pressfield on. It's outrageous, the people that he's had on his show. What I always love about his style is that, one, he does a tremendous amount of research, which isn't necessarily my style, but I envy his curiosity and the way that he breaks down topics. He tries to really break it down into how a concept impacts our lives in a practical sense, outside of the tribalism and emotional bureaucracy that we deal with every single day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was excited when he said yes. I'm excited that he came on the show. I thought we had a tremendous conversation, and I also am very proud of myself for not going completely fanboy because of how much respect I have. I've listened to James' podcast since his very first episode, and I think he's at like episode 900 or something now, which is crazy. So you're going to love this. We go all different places, and specifically we dive into how insurance professionals can skip the line, can get ahead, can make that leap from where they are to someplace further in career development than would normally be expected. I think you're going to get tremendous value out of that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I want to give a shout out to today's sponsor, and that is Agency VA. I've talked about it multiple times. Agency VA is the horsepower behind my agency. I have a tremendous tactical service VA, and I now have an appointment center who's actually calling out to target markets, delivering our value proposition, and trying to set up appointments for me. It's already starting to bear fruit. We're less than a month in, and it's an incredible decision. These are just the first two VAs that I brought on. They supplement the work that Sarah's doing and that I'm doing, and we can continue to build our team out. If it wasn't for Wes and Ben and Lally and the entire team at Agency VA, everyone that I've come in contact with there has been nothing but absolutely tremendous. My agency wouldn't be where it is today without Agency VA.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Also, interestingly enough, I think their office or headquarters is right across the street from Podium, which is another tremendous technology that I've started to look into for some of my inbound stuff. Podium is a new sponsor of the show as well. They're not today's sponsor technically, but it's just interesting that Agency VA and Podium can see each other from their buildings. Both are big time pieces of what Rogue will be. You'll hear more about Podium as I start to dig into how it impacts and helps my agency. But go to agencyva.com. That's agencyva.com. Go to agencyva.com today. If you need help, talk to Wes. Talk to Ben. Talk to the team there. Think about a virtual assistant—not just any virtual assistant, but one whose hiring process, technology, and tools are targeted for the insurance industry. You can't go wrong.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right, let's get on to what was easily one of my favorite conversations I've had in a very long time with one of my absolute favorite thought leaders in the entire world today, James Altucher.
--:-- James Altucher: Hey Ryan, how's it going?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hey James, how are you?
--:-- James Altucher: Good, good. You daisy chaining interviews today or what?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, just kind of hanging out.
--:-- James Altucher: That's nice. My book came out a couple weeks ago, so maybe that day I probably should have done more promoting the book. But I do so much each time, and I just figured, let's see if just word of mouth will do it.
--:-- James Altucher: I don't think word of mouth does it. I mean, all my reviews are great and all the feedback is great, but I have found that a lot of people don't even know I have a new book out. So whatever, it was an experiment and it is what it is.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I get that. It seems like you've launched every book differently, at least the books since I've been in your ecosystem, which is seven or eight years.
--:-- James Altucher: Yeah, I always try different things. I got a little tired of marketing, because marketing is important. It would be great if, let's just pick a mythical thing, if Kim Kardashian announced on her Instagram and Twitter that the only book she would ever recommend to anyone is *Skip the Line* by James Altucher, that would clearly be a great thing. But to get to that point would involve me saying, doing, and acting in certain ways that don't feel authentic to me. That includes even asking people if I can go on their podcast. You're supposed to just be not afraid to ask. I'm not really afraid to ask, but I'm also not that comfortable with it.
--:-- James Altucher: I feel like the book did its best when people authentically said, "Hey, this is great. Can we talk more about it on my podcast?" Or, "Hey, this is great. I'd like to recommend this on my TV show," or just the word spread on Twitter and stuff. I don't like the idea of branding and marketing that much. I also think that you have to be very careful with the favors that you pull. You work so hard to generate friendships and the social capital that comes with friendships. If you're constantly pulling that favor lever when you really need it, it's not there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I agree. On the one hand, you should be comfortable about asking people to help you. In fact, people often enjoy being asked to help. But I'm on the receiving end of a lot of that. I do a podcast and every day I probably get about 30 requests. "Hey, can you put so-and-so who wrote a book called *Make Your Dreams Happen*?" And this person always wanted to be a goat herder in Montana and they made their dreams happen. All these books are great and they work really hard at it. I admire anybody who writes a book, but I feel bad because I can't even literally respond to all the emails. So then do they hate me afterwards? Not that I even care that much. I don't know them. It's just a weird thing where, you use the word ecosystem—that's part of the ecosystem of a podcast and of anybody who has a platform. "Hey, can you read it?" I have a whole thing of free books that people send me unsolicited. I don't mind it. I read most of the books or at least look at them. If something is great, I do ask them.
--:-- James Altucher: For instance, I'm friends with Tim Ferriss, and I would love to go on his podcast and talk about my book, but I will not ask him to go on his podcast because you're right. There is social capital that's spent, and I don't really communicate with him that much. If you communicate with him the only time is when you need something, I think that's poor form. I'd rather just be there and comment on it. The way I communicate with him is if he writes something I like, I write him and comment on it and we have a dialogue. But I don't need to say, "Hey, can you please let me on your podcast? I have a new book out." You might not have read it. You might not have heard about it. I'm proud of the book already because I just see from the reviews and from the emails I get that it's already helped a lot of people, and that was my goal. I'm fine with where it is.
--:-- James Altucher: I know I'm rambling about marketing. I will say one thing about branding. The other day I was in some kind of Q&A and someone said, "I felt you really hurt your brand when you shut down your crypto news." I had a crypto newsletter for a while. I recommended people buy—I recommended in 2013 on CNBC that people buy Bitcoin, and I recommended it again in the fall of 2017, and I started a newsletter about it. But then I stopped it because everybody wanted to day trade these shit alt currencies. I was just interested in recommending Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum, which proved to be correct. I even said 95% of these alt currencies are going to go out of business and Bitcoin's going to survive. I took a lot of heat. People were laughing at me. People were insulting me, which is fine. I always say the things that I think will help most people, and I always want to be authentic to myself in terms of shutting things down that I feel are no longer necessary, even if it costs me money or whatever.
--:-- James Altucher: I said to this person, "What does it mean to ruin your brand? Think about Coca-Cola. A brand is basically the difference between reality and the lie." So Coca-Cola—"Oh, if I drink Coca-Cola, I'm going to be skateboarding in Santa Monica with all my cool, beautiful friends, and Coke is just going to be spraying everywhere like one giant Coke orgasm." But the reality is, as Steve Jobs once put it, Coke is just sugared water. A brand is this thing with beautiful people and "this could be you," and it's a lie. The authentic thing is more real. I can choose. Do I want sugared water or not? If I'm willing to do that, then I'll do it.
--:-- James Altucher: In terms of personal branding, it became this big thing over the past 10 years. "What's your personal brand?" Well, I want that perception to be as close to reality as possible. If you succeed, you succeeded because you're who you are, and your authentic message helps the world and has a better chance of not only helping people but surviving for the long term. If it's just based on brand—brand is the difference between the perception and the reality, and that's just all air. That air is a waste of air, and I don't want to do that. So I don't care about brand or personal branding.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree.
--:-- James Altucher: I just came on your show and I took over. I'm sorry about that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, it's fine. It's good. I wholly agree with you. In the insurance space, I have one of the longest running podcasts, and I have people who, to a much smaller extent, I kind of understand exactly everything you just said, but take it to independent insurance agents in the United States. Take that ecosystem. People say things like, "Oh, how do I become an insurance influencer like you?" I'll say to them, "Stop thinking about becoming an insurance influencer." That's step number one. Just take that whole concept out and just be. If you're interested in a topic in our space, just talk about it. There's no gain. If I get on this podcast and I write for this insurance carrier and I make this many tweets, all of a sudden people are going to care? You either have interesting things to say that help people, or you don't.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I only started this podcast because I wanted free consulting. I went to college to drink beer, chase women, and play baseball. That was basically it.
--:-- James Altucher: A job at those things, because that's important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. So I'll tell you what didn't get me a job: my math degree. That did not get me any money.
--:-- James Altucher: That's a hard degree to get though. I'm impressed with that. I agree with you about college, and I've written quite a lot about this, but a math degree is a hard degree. You learn how to think about certain situations very quickly. I think that improves your brain. A math degree is a skill.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What was funny about that was, I went to the University of Rochester. When I would walk into one of my math classes, it was like one of these things is not like the other. "What is he doing here?" All my classmates are up on the chalkboard, A plus B equals seven, let's prove this, and they're using letters. Today I couldn't even recreate it. I'd be sitting in the back, the rat in my brain working as hard as he could just to keep up with these dudes, and they'd be like this is light work for them. This is their warm-up equation.
--:-- James Altucher: That happens to me too. I was majoring in computer science, but a lot of computer science intersects with math. There would be some guys in the back of the class not paying attention, and then they would get beyond an A plus. It was so easy for them. I was just struggling. But there are good things about the struggle. If you're interested in the topic, you find yourself finding new ways to learn because it's so hard for you. The people who find it easy don't necessarily learn about learning because it's so easy for them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. What it did, and this is the strange part, is it forced me into learning writing and talking better. I wanted to go to school to be a mechanical engineer. I hit thermodynamics and basically had to make the decision: drink beer, chase women, play baseball, or become a mechanical engineer. I didn't become a mechanical engineer. I went to my guidance counselor and said, "It's second semester, sophomore year. I have like a 1.7 in engineering. How the heck do I graduate?" She said, "Math is the only thing that you can get and get out of here in the normal amount of time." That's what turned me to a math major. It sucked so bad and I hated every second of it that I started focusing on writing. That's when I got into writing and speaking and communication. Today that has become a big part of my life. It was just funny how in high school it was science and math, and I find those things infinitely interesting, but in school they actually pushed me back into the liberal arts because I was like, "This is really tough, and I don't really want to dedicate the brain cycles to this."
--:-- James Altucher: Let me ask you a question. In terms of becoming an insurance influencer—let's just brainstorm for a second, even though I know you've thought about this for a million hours. My gut would tell me that there are creative ways. Each person individually has their own insurance profile. For instance, for me, I don't need insurance for basic medical, but if I don't have insurance at all—in fact, right now I should get it. I'm 53 years old, I should probably get catastrophic insurance, just in case something catastrophic happens. And then I should probably get liability insurance, just in case someone trips on my sidewalk or something. But each person is different.
--:-- James Altucher: Being really honest—even though let's say I'm an insurance agent, and even though my objective is to sell you as much insurance as possible—I should really define my own methodology for figuring out what is your ideal insurance profile, so you don't have to get everything. Insurance is basically another form of a casino, and the odds are stacked against the regular person. But you get insurance to have peace of mind, which I get. There's probably other kinds of creative insurance that people don't even know about. If you're a dentist, what's insurance for retainers that people don't pay for? Or Warren Buffett sells nuclear attack insurance for Super Bowls. There are probably creative insurance things and business models around insurance. That's how I would approach being an insurance influencer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You're not off completely. The interesting thing is, if I were to look back at 16-year-old Ryan becoming an insurance agent, it's not every little boy's dream. Not even close. But it's a fun industry because it's all statistics and odds. It is a giant casino. It can range from—what I find interesting are the problems that you have to solve. Not necessarily the insurance problems, because those are a little more straightforward. There's some creative stuff depending on how crazy the risk is. But what I find interesting is the business model challenges. If you're going to sell auto insurance, you have a very unique set of problems to solve to put enough auto insurance into your business to actually make money, because now you're competing against Warren Buffett. You're competing against all these different forms.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other side of the coin is you can go completely custom paper. You can have direct contracts with Lloyds of London. I know guys that have flown and gone onto the Lloyds floor and literally written out—on a computer, but written out word for word—entire scripted policies that serve flood insurance to mountainous regions in Northern California. That's how specific they get. There's this wide range, and you can choose your own path inside that range, from as commoditized as it gets to as unique as it gets. Then you have distribution model issues, which is major.
--:-- James Altucher: There's another reason to get insurance: peace of mind. If something accidental happens, the one in a million chance you fall off the Eiffel Tower, you need catastrophic insurance or whatever. But there's a fascinating part of insurance where you could beat the odds. If you understand where the odds are being mispriced—which is very difficult because there are PhDs all over the place figuring out the odds on every tiny event in your life—but if for some reason you think you are not accurately being represented by the odds, then you should buy insurance.
--:-- James Altucher: For instance, let's say you don't take good care of yourself, but you're 30 years old. There are ways to analyze what your biological age is as opposed to your chronological age. If your biological age is 50 instead of 30, which unfortunately for you is not very good, you could basically buy insurance that's priced for 30-year-olds, knowing that you have the biological makeup of a 50-year-old and might need it more than the average person. Now you've won at the casino. The people who get the money when you pass on hit the lottery there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Exactly.
--:-- James Altucher: There are interesting issues with insurance where it's like stocks. When are you a good thing for insurance companies to take a risk on, because you're defying the odds in one way or the other? Knowing about that is interesting. But you'd have to convince people that this is an interesting thing. You're appreciative of this because of your math background, but most people don't even really understand what insurance actually is.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, and that's the thing. I didn't want to talk to you just about insurance, but it is interesting. It's about being an influencer in an authentic way, as opposed to saying, "What would happen to your family if you got hit by a car tomorrow morning? You never know." The reality is you do know the odds. But when they sell it and they're trying to be an influencer—"I can help you find an insurance broker, I can help you find the cheapest way to do this"—that's a little bit inauthentic to me.
--:-- James Altucher: It plays out in your numbers.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You can sell on fear. The number one way from a conversion and cost of acquisition standpoint of selling insurance is fear. "Hey, you're this many years old. Statistics tell me that a male this age with these defining characteristics dies this many years from now. So buy your life insurance today." Or, "You're in Florida. Every three out of every 10 drivers in Florida has no insurance. So if they hit you with their car, they can't give you a dollar. So you need to have this." You can sell on fear. The problem is, the harder you sell on fear, statistically, the lower your retention rates are, because the way you're driving them in actually trains your clients to live on fear. They look for the next best person who's selling harder or selling fear in a different way.
--:-- James Altucher: That's such a good point. When you're inauthentic, the only asset you have going into this idea of "how can I be an influencer" is your ability to sell. Essentially your ability to bullshit. If someone can bullshit better than you, then the customer's like, "Oh, this is a better influencer than that guy," even though you might not be thinking the word influencer. But if you could say, "Listen, no bullshit. You really don't need all insurance packages. You don't even need basic health insurance with your income and your health makeup. But look, if you go to sleep at night worried about how you're going to take care of your family if suddenly you get cancer, then here's the type of insurance that might be interesting to you. If your business sometimes doesn't make payroll, it's not insurance, but maybe getting a credit line from a bank is a way of having insurance to meet your payroll just in case your customers are late paying. I'm not going to bullshit you. I'm going to make less money off of you than all the other guys, but that's fine. At least you're going to get the right insurance and we build a relationship. I'm just being upfront and honest about what I'm doing."
--:-- James Altucher: This is why when you were talking about brand before—the difference between what you say and who you are, and everything in the middle is the bullshit.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I personally believe, on the idea of brand, what I'm trying to do because I own an independent insurance agency—I actually started March 9th of last year, so I'm a year and two days in. I wish for many reasons someone would have told me seven days after I hit the launch button the zombie apocalypse was going to happen. But I'm sure everyone does.
--:-- James Altucher: Just out of curiosity, did you get into any COVID-specific packages?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No. I tried to not go out of business every day by fighting and scratching. For the first two months—I primarily focus on commercial insurance, property casualty. Professional liability, workers' compensation, general liability, property. If you run a contracting business or you're a manufacturer, or I have a lot of people who run marketing agencies around the country that I do their insurance for. For the first two and a half months after I launched, no one would take a phone call. It's the middle of COVID. Who wants to take a phone call from a startup insurance agency and talk about switching their insurance? Nobody. It was an interesting time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What it forced me to do was really hammer in the idea that what I deliver has to be this far away from—and no one can see me. Except for James, my phone gears are very close to each other. It has to be this close. I actually have to deliver on what I'm saying I'm going to do. That value proposition has to be substantially different because what everyone else was doing was price, price, price, price, price, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. That's a low retention, high churn business that I have no desire to play in. It also isn't long-term profitable.
--:-- James Altucher: I'm taking notes.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So that was a really interesting time.
--:-- James Altucher: How did you differentiate yourself?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: First of all, my agency's name is not my last name, which is about 90% of insurance agencies in the country. They'd be like "Hanley Insurance Services." My agency is called Rogue Risk. One single syllable alliteration. R is a power letter. I also just like the word rogue. I wanted to define myself immediately with the word rogue as something that was tangential to the concepts you would think about with insurance. You think insurance, you don't immediately think rogue. So it does pop people's attention to go, "There's something different about that."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Most agents just come in two months before renewal and say, "Hey, let me quote your price. Hey James, you got to have professional liability. You're a podcaster. Let me quote your price." And you go, "God, all right, whatever, sure." Maybe you change, maybe you don't. It depends on how much they're saving you. What I am trying to do is flip that by saying, "I actually have a service plan." It sounds terrible, I'm not describing it the proper way. But what I do is walk you through a whole set of processes that actually lets you take control of your price. It's not in your agent's best interest for your price to go down. It's only in their best interest for your price to be at its lowest the moment you buy. Then they're actually incentivized through commissions for your price to steadily increase over time with them as the agent.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What I'm trying to do—this is why growth is slower, but hopefully retention is higher—is say to you, "The highest I want your price to ever be is the day that I sell you. Then we're going to work to push it down over time." This is your 10,000 experiments thing, which I eventually want to talk about. I've probably cross-cut that in social and in video about a thousand times. In less than a year, I've created probably one of the more traffic-heavy YouTube channels for an insurance agent in the entire country. I've done about 160 videos inside a year.
--:-- James Altucher: You've really been doing a good job of combining traditional insurance broker thinking with social media influence-style marketing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I call it a "human optimized agency," which is an awful term. I got to figure out a cooler word for it. But what I'm trying to do is take all the core values of a traditional agency—caring, compassion, trustworthiness, which they do actually have. Working with an independent agent, the vast majority of them are awesome. They just have no ability to come to you in your space. You have to come to them. So I said, "I'm going to take this world and I'm going to take the digital world, and I'm going to try to take the best pieces of both and mash them together." There's no soul here to the business. You're just transaction seven, five, eight, T-seven. Over here, you're James Altucher, but man, we're going to make it as hard as possible for you to do business with us. I'm trying to mash those two things together in the middle. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
--:-- James Altucher: Have you thought about going meta with this concept?
--:-- James Altucher: So, and this is what I call, I call this in the, I think in the Skip the Line, I call this idea exponential. So there's like idea, I have a chapter about idea calculus where I talk about idea sex, which I've mentioned in other books, by talking about idea subtraction, idea division, idea multiplication, and idea exponential. So an idea exponential is when you meta your idea.
--:-- James Altucher: So this idea of taking an industry that is 99% filled with old school techniques for selling and going meta with a technique that's worked for you to then sell that meta service to other industries. So for instance, go to personal injury lawyers. A lot of them, you know, chase ambulances. That's the traditional model. But what if you say, listen, how about we hit a larger audience more authentically and in a more kind of without you driving around all night chasing ambulances, like you could kind of make money or get customers while you sleep sort of thing.
--:-- James Altucher: I'm going to take what I did in the insurance business and help you do it for your business so that you can use social media appropriately and quadruple your revenues. It seems like you could provide that service because you've done it so well for yourself.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, etc. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So it's funny that you said that. One, that is in my game plan. Some of it is I have to hit escape velocity and revenue for this business before I start growing other people's businesses. And that sounds like an excuse, and I know that's very reasonable.
--:-- James Altucher: Yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But I have started to do this with something. And this feels more like a consulting conversation than a podcast interview, though hopefully it's engaging for you.
--:-- James Altucher: Absolutely.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the coverages that I believe very strongly in is cyber insurance right now. It's the fastest growing risk that every human has. Both families like me sitting in—I work out of this is my home office—my family has this risk, and my business has this risk at the same exact time. It's cyber attacks, particularly the two big ones: ransomware attacks and social engineering. Social engineering is you get an email from me that looks like me, you click on it, and now all of a sudden you're wire transferring to some account somewhere.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know this exists for identity theft, but this doesn't exist in general. So cyber insurance does exist. Identity theft is basically a small amount of recouped coverage for personal issues, but it doesn't necessarily cover what if someone uses your home router to then steal and do wire transfer fraud to all your neighbors. What identity theft does is try to get you off the underground, the dark web. Like if we find you there, we're going to monitor it. But what cyber insurance is going to do is help you recoup the loss when the social security number of your neighbor down the street is used to buy a house in some other state to take out a loan. That's going to come back to you. That's what cyber insurance is for. So individuals have this risk. The larger risk is businesses.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I just got a call from a guy, because again, because of YouTube videos and stuff, I get a lot of random phone calls. He said, "I just had to shut my business down. We had a $600,000 cyber loss, which was ransomware." Basically, they put malware on, shut his hard drive down, and he had to pay 600 grand to get it back—500 grand to get it back, another 100 to get the hardware fixed. But the bigger issue was, and he didn't have this on his policy, his two biggest clients, because of the reputational risk of now having this issue, canceled. They said, "We can't, as a board, put our businesses in jeopardy by working with someone who just had a major cyber attack." So they canceled their contract with him. 90 employees unemployed that day. Boom. Done.
--:-- James Altucher: That's horrible. Why didn't he just use Dropbox or AWS? If someone stole my hard drive, I could care less because I store everything in the cloud.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. So he didn't do that. This is the issue. There's two levels. And this is a very tangential way of saying I'm working with a couple of different cybersecurity firms and a couple attorneys that focus on cyber to help them put content together, because cyber is a big part of it. But I'm really the last defense. What you need is the actual processes. Technology is part of it, but it's more what you said: having standard backups, having dual servers that aren't connected. So anything that goes in one is just mapped or mirrored to another. It could be a Dropbox file. That's a very simple way to do it. So if someone throws a ransomware attack on one server, you're like, "No problem. We're going to cut the hard line and just fire this other one up." No one knows the difference. You can have this thing that's worthless. I'm never going to pay you. That can be jammed up forever because I have my full data backup over on this server. And off we go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: These types of procedures are how you defend 99% of these. The last layer of defense is if for some reason one of these fail states doesn't work, then you have the cyber insurance to back you up. So that's a whole service: ransomware-proof your business. Insurance is a component of that.
--:-- James Altucher: So that could be almost like the next level of meta. And then the final level of meta, or the next meta level of meta after that, would be other industries. Like personal injury lawyers or dentists or whatever.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. So it's interesting stuff. But let me ask you some questions. I didn't get a chance to do this because we got right into the conversation. I want to do a super quick ego stroke for you. I have to say this. I have been following your podcast since the very first episode. I can't tell you where I found it. I have absolutely no idea how I ran into your stuff. I used to read Stockpicker, although to be honest with you, I had no freaking clue it was you until I heard you talk about it on the podcast years later.
--:-- James Altucher: I think I have a personal branding problem. At least back then.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: At least back then. But from the very first episode, I think you are one of the best interviewers in the entire world right now. That episode you did with Larry King. As someone who listens to you and listened to Larry King, and Cal Fussman, who's awesome, I said to myself, you were putting Larry up on a pedestal, and certainly the longevity of what he did deserved every bit of that. But I think you are as good as he was, with a slightly different style. I just wanted to get that off my chest because I have been such a fan for so long.
--:-- James Altucher: Man, I truly appreciate that because I really study interviewing. You look at the great interviewers out there like Howard Stern. Whether you like what he says or not, or you think he's too dirty or whatever, he is a great interviewer. He recently had a book come out called "Here He Comes Again," which is the text transcripts of many of his interviews. You can really see what he's doing and how good he is. Larry King, I didn't know what I thought about him because he had this style I didn't quite appreciate: not doing any research at all before the interview. But Cal explained to me why he did that, and it gave me a new appreciation of Larry. I have to re-listen to some of his interviews now.
--:-- James Altucher: There are many different styles and techniques. But one thing in common with a good interviewer is relatability. No one is going to give a shit about giving you good answers if they don't like you. Both Howard and Larry have that. I think the interviews I've done, particularly early on, where I failed were when the person I was interviewing didn't like me because I didn't spend the time establishing relatability and likability. It's a difficult thing to interview well. I've been on a thousand podcasts, and I can see the difference between the good and the bad.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Who would be an interview that you think you didn't do well? What would be an example of that?
--:-- James Altucher: This was early on. There was a rapper, Biz Markie, from the eighties. He had a classic song called "She's Just a Friend." It's a famous song. If you were to hear it, you would say, "Oh yeah, I like that song." The good thing is it's a really funny video. Biz Markie had a unique style, a little bit dissonant in his singing. There wasn't really singing and rap then, so he was playing with the form. That's why rap is an art form and not a fad, though in the beginning people thought it was. He sings off-key, but it's a good story, a good concept, a relatable concept, and a good beat.
--:-- James Altucher: I asked him, "How do you feel about the fact that most people know you from that one song?" He got very upset. He said, "I've done many other songs, and I'm also so-and-so on this Nickelodeon show that millions of kids watch." I said, "I know that, but if I go to China right now and hum 'She's Just a Friend,' all billion people in China will know what song I'm referring to." He said, "No, no, no, man. I've done more than one song." I said, "I know that. But when I go to your website, as soon as I reload it, it starts playing that song. Clearly you must think it's your most valuable thing in your repertoire."
--:-- James Altucher: The mistake I made there was that everything I was saying was valid and everything he was saying was valid. But I didn't bond with him a little beforehand. You have to be authentic about it. I really do admire the guy. And when he pushed back, there was no reason for me to argue with him. The Howard Stern technique would be to say, "Okay, yeah, you've done many great things," and then later on circle back a different way to get the same point across when you've reestablished the bonding and given him status as an artist, which is clearly what he was looking for.
--:-- James Altucher: Another thing I learned from that one: rather than just air the interview—and I did air it, I air the good and the bad and the ugly—I meta-aired it. I was with the sound guy and one of the producers of the show, and I would rewind back and forth the interview and analyze where I went wrong. So the podcast became about how badly I interviewed him and how I could have done better. I made good use of a bad interview. But that was an example of a bad one. I have many bad ones. I've done like eight or nine hundred podcasts now. Hopefully more good than bad.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Having just listened for as long as I have, it's been intriguing to me to watch you evolve, or to hear you evolve. At the beginning, obviously you were very raw. But the thing that has pulled me all the way through, and has been aspirational for me—I've been podcasting since 2011—is that you've never lost your curiosity. If I had to pin one thing, when people say, "Why are you listening to that guy? Sometimes he talks about space, other times he's talking about crypto, he's interviewing some celebrity. Why do you get so into that show?" I say, "Sometimes I can give two flying fucks what the guest does. I'm just not interested in the guest. But I am very interested in how, after all these episodes, you've never lost that thread of curiosity for all these random concepts and ideas and how you tie them together."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Do you think that's part of your personality? Is that who you are? Is it something you've had to work at? Are there days when you show up to punch into the podcast and you're just like, "Shit, I really don't want to ask any questions today"?
--:-- James Altucher: Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of times. This is the thing: I've interviewed a lot of self-help people in the past, and they have problems. Everybody's got problems, no matter how much of an expert you are at anything, even keeping yourself motivated. Sometimes you're just not motivated. Sometimes you're burnt out. Life's a hard thing. Part of the challenge of life is showing up every day, and even that's hard some days. You can't.
--:-- James Altucher: But I always have a guest on that I personally need to know. Let's say I have on a physicist. Like many people, I think it's an intriguing question: How did the universe start? What happened before the Big Bang? What's the benefit of asking these questions? Why should we care? We're never going to know the answers. But I've been curious about these things since I was a kid. That's why I might talk to a space person.
--:-- James Altucher: Or let's say I have on someone like Sara Blakely, who started Spanx. It's a multi-billion dollar company now. She's one of the richest women in the world. She was a door-to-door fax machine salesman who didn't know the first thing about clothing, and then she creates one of the largest clothing lines in the world. How do you do that? I want to pivot my life sometimes. I want to change careers and do something more exciting. How did she face all the people who told her, "You can't do this. You needed to go to school for it"? I was curious.
--:-- James Altucher: Or let's say I'm starting stand-up comedy and I got heckled the night before. I would have on a comedian and say, "What did you do when you got heckled?" I would be asking questions that would better my life. The reality is, if something betters my life, then there are going to be answers there that better everyone's life. I find a lot of people have on guests because they're famous or because it will drive traffic. That's not a good long-term way to do a podcast. It has to come from your deep personal curiosity and love for the topic. Because then there's an audience for everything if you're authentic. If it's about rap, there's a huge audience. Comedy, huge audience. Business, investing, leadership, congressmen, presidents. But you have to know it because you're interested.
--:-- James Altucher: For instance, we're doing a podcast right now using Zoom. Zoom is great—700 million users. No one says Zoom shouldn't exist. But for podcasters, Zoom is not ideal. The video is a little low quality, so YouTube will not favor videos done in Zoom. The audio is low quality because it has that internet compression feel. There's not really a good solution out there. I researched this a lot. For the past almost year now, I've been creating my own software that has all the qualities I want. How did I validate the idea? I didn't validate the idea. I only know because I've done and been on thousands of podcasts. I only know what I would use. So I'm creating the software I would use. That's good enough for me because I am authentically asking: Who am I? What do I know about this? What do I want? Why now is it important? Why hasn't it been created before? How am I going to create this that is unique?
--:-- James Altucher: I can say, "This is the reason why nobody else has done this." If I can answer those questions, I validated the idea and I know other people will use it. Because if I'm a good podcaster and having difficulties, then many of the 2 million other podcasters are having the same difficulties. It all comes from my own personal needs, and that's how you satisfy other people's needs.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think you hit it right on the head. This comes back to everything we were saying at the beginning about brand and all these things. If you have someone on your show simply because you think it's going to have traffic, you put yourself in a position to have a terrible episode. I actually hit the jackpot with this the other day. I took a chance on Todd Stottlemyre, a former major league pitcher. About 12 years ago, I did a couple of interviews with him. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona. He came out with a book, and his person reached out and said, "Hey, I'd love to come on." I knew him as a major league pitcher. I watched him win the World Series. But who the heck knows, right? I just said, "Screw it." Ended up being freaking awesome. We had one of the best conversations I've had. Now we tweet at each other every once in a while. Wonderful guy.
--:-- James Altucher: He's super smart. I love his whole vibe.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It was awesome.
--:-- James Altucher: That reminds me of Joe Moglia. He was the CEO of Ameritrade and created it into a multi-billion dollar bank. He was a phenomenal Wall Street CEO. Then he quit. He didn't want to be CEO of a bank anymore. He became an assistant coach for the University of Nebraska football team. He totally changed his career to being a football coach. Then he became a successful coach for the Carolina Panthers. Now he's retired. I wasn't interested in banking or a CEO term. I'm not interested in football at all. But I was really interested in how he changed like that and what flack he got. He got divorced. He had to take two steps back to move one step forward. Stuff like that, you hit the jackpot sometimes and it's fun.
--:-- James Altucher: Other times, I had on Chelsea Handler because I thought it would be a lot of traffic. Not only was that the worst episode ever, but it didn't even get traffic. People could tell instantly: "This is not James' style."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That was a tough one. I could tell that you were working. It felt weird because I listen to you so much, but even in that episode as a listener, I could tell you were working.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So Brian Keating—I asked him after the episode, you did those four or five episodes with him right in a row. I reached out to him and said, "Dude, I run an insurance podcast, but this shit is so interesting. Is there any way you'll come on?" He said yes. We're going to have a conversation in a couple of weeks. That is like butter. I can tell when you, Cal Fussman, other people come on. It's like we just got stadium seats to the two of you having a cup of coffee. It's awesome.
--:-- James Altucher: That's a good way to put it. Another great interviewer, which is almost surprising to call him an interviewer, is Joe Rogan. Every one of his guests feels like he's having his best friend on and they're just having a conversation. But ultimately, you see he gets what he wants out of the conversation and some other things he didn't want, which is always good too. He's a great interviewer, one of the greats. I don't want to say I emulate him because there are a lot of Joe Rogan ripoffs in podcasting. But I love that concept: have someone on who is a friend, or it feels like a conversation of friends. Then everyone feels like they're just sitting around the coffee table listening in on this conversation. You don't have to be a gotcha questioner to get people to open up, which is my least favorite form of interviewing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm also a big fan of Jordan Peterson. I just read "Beyond Order," which was amazing. I've been rewatching a lot of his stuff from two years ago before he got sick. I watch these interviews not so much for the interviewer, but for how he handles them personally. You never get what you want with that hard-hitting, "I'm going to ask you the question no one is willing to ask" method. In my opinion, that never actually gets you anything. You might get an answer, but it's surface. If you can bring them in and make them feel comfortable in an honest way, maybe you don't get it out of them. You're taking more of a chance. They may just not come out with it. You may try to prod them and they may say no. But I would always rather that than "I'm just going to hit you with this hard question." If you say no, then you look like a jerk.
--:-- James Altucher: I agree. If you look at interviews of other people interviewing Jordan Peterson, they're all horrible. You can see the average interviewer is really not that good because they all just don't listen to him. They're trying to get their own agenda out. People think without knowing that he's some bad weird guy. But he's not. He's one of the most generous, nice people I've seen. People have totally misunderstood his whole thing about language and the issues he got in trouble with. I interviewed him. He's a really good interviewee. I asked him after the podcast, or maybe it was during, to help me figure out where I stack on this. He said, "You need more confidence." I took that to heart.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I remember when you put that on air. I think I remember that.
--:-- James Altucher: Yeah. His first book, "12 Rules for Life," embedded the concept of personal responsibility into me as a person. I knew of the idea. I probably gave it lip service. That book really wedged that concept into me and probably made me better in a lot of different ways as a human.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, we're coming up against a time, and I want to be respectful of your time. I had a whole bunch of questions, none of which we got to. Maybe just a couple of quick ones before we run.
--:-- James Altucher: Yeah, sure.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My favorite quote from "Skip the Line" is, "You can't think your way to success." In whatever way you think is important, I find in my space, the insurance industry, the type of people who fall into our space tend to be overthinkers. They obviously do because you have to be able to sell and operate to run a successful business. But they tend to be overthinkers. When I heard this, I thought, "I got to ask him about this to help people put this idea into context."
--:-- James Altucher: A lot of people, for instance, I just described this thing about a Zoom-related product I'm making for podcasters. It's great to think and think and think: "This would be good. This would be good. One day when I get a chance, I should do this." You should just start doing. One action of doing is worth like a million thoughts about it. It's really important because I could think all I want, "Oh, this would be a great product. I don't have the time to do it. I'll do it, but first I'll raise money." No. You can do a simple thing.
--:-- James Altucher: Here's one thing I could have done: I could have asked other podcasters, "Do you think this is a good idea?" That's actually a good way to market because everybody will later ask, "Hey, did you finish that? I'd like to use it." Or let's say I want to make a new clothing line. I had this idea a year ago: if we're all going to be indoors for the next six months, what clothes do you wear indoors? The most comfortable clothes in the world are pajamas by definition because you can sleep in them. I said, "We no longer need to go to work. We no longer need to wear a suit. What if I make outerwear that has the design of outerwear but is actually pajamas in terms of materials?" What am I going to do? I'm not a clothing man. Call a manufacturer and make some pajamas that have outerwear designs? I just started wearing pajamas everywhere I went—on a plane, to a restaurant, meeting people—and see what people's reactions were about why I was wearing pajamas. Those are simple doings.
--:-- James Altucher: Or let's say I have a book I want to write. Here are 20 articles I might have written about the topic. I'm going to print them up and staple them together. That's the first draft of my book. I just created a book in 20 minutes. Is that the final book? No. A book goes through 30 drafts before it becomes an actual book. The final product will be very different. But I did something, and I can hold it in my hands. This is my first draft. People say, "Isn't that a bunch of articles you just stapled together?" Yeah, but it's my first draft. I did it. What have they done? Everybody wants to write a book. They say, "I got to sit down and write it. I'm going to go to a monastery for three weeks so I can have peace and quiet." Why don't you just paste? Why don't you just talk into a tape recorder for a couple of hours? You have at least three or four chapters.
--:-- James Altucher: Get the transcripts, print it up. And that's your first draft or your first draft. Yeah, first third of the book. So there's always something you can do to move forward.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: OK, like, well, I could say, well, if I were running for president, I would do this, this and this.
--:-- James Altucher: Well, OK, here's an idea. Go to FEC.gov, which is the Federal Elections Commission website, and it will take you about 10 minutes. And you could file to run for president. And guess what? Once you file to run for president, it actually makes you start thinking about it in a more clever way because doing also is a cognitive bias. When you do something, it tells your brain, "Hey, this is kind of important to me." So cognitive biases start to kick in about what you should do next and how you think about something.
--:-- So thinking doesn't trigger that. The brain enjoys just thinking about bullshit all day long. It's kind of masturbatory to a certain extent.
--:-- James Altucher: But when you actually do something, the brain snaps to alert and thinks, "Oh, he just did something. Do I need to help him with this?" And the answer is always yes. The brain thinks, "I wouldn't do it without a reason." And so it starts making you think differently about things. So doing is actually a great way to improve your learning and your interest in something, which further spirals into more. It's like a virtuous cycle that spirals into more learning and so on.
--:-- And then when you do stuff, you get to see, "Oh, that was easy" or "Oh, that was hard." And you actually learn things you would never learn by thinking. Like I can say to myself all day long and talk at cocktail parties, "Why don't we make suits made out of pajama slash silk cotton?" And people are like, "Oh, that's so clever," and they sip their wine and have hors d'oeuvres. But if you actually are partly doing it, you could say, "No, really, I'm wearing pajamas right now. Can't you tell?" And they're like, "No, I can't. It looks like a suit." And I'm like, "Yeah, it's a suit, but it's super comfortable like pajamas are." Now you've actually done something that costs you nothing.
--:-- And that's why in the book *Skip the Line*, I have this concept of the 10,000 experiment rule instead of the 10,000 hour rule. The idea is that if you do things that are experiments to try to learn from them, and every experiment almost by definition has low downside—what's the harm?—and high upside. If this works, it'll be amazing. And if you're just sitting every day thinking, "Here's how I can get better, here's how I can get better," well, you won't get anywhere as far as by actually doing things and learning that way by experimenting, testing ideas out, and so on. Just by doing. It's such an important thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: James, I really appreciate your time, man. This has been a lot of fun for me. I had no idea where we would go. This is why I don't normally put stupid notes down on a piece of paper, because I never actually get to any of them.
--:-- But for all you listening, I highly recommend "I'm Running for President 2.0" or "Running for President 2.0" with Phil Stott. That episode—I freaking love that episode. Whether you ever have any intention of running for president or for marketing, for how you dial into your customer base, your audience, or whatever you're trying to do. I thought that episode was really, really good. Some of the things that you guys dial into are very interesting to me.
--:-- But the book, *Skip the Line*. And then when you go to *Skip the Line* on Amazon, it's going to pull up *Choose Yourself* as a "buy this book too." Get that one as well if you haven't already. Both of them are absolutely tremendous. James wrote a ton of books. Those are the two that I would read first if I were you.
--:-- James, man, I just appreciate that you keep doing your thing, man.
--:-- James Altucher: I appreciate it, Ryan. Thanks so much. And look, let's stay in touch. And I'm happy to come on again at some point.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Awesome. Thank you. Talk to you soon. Good luck with Brian Keating. That's going to be a great one.
--:-- James Altucher: Yeah.
--:-- [End of interview. Promotional message begins.]
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