643: Laowhy86 | How the Chinese Social Credit Score System Works Part One

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altucher Show. What is the real product of Instagram? If you say photos, you're almost right, but not quite. Plus, I talk about some more of my favorite persuasion techniques. I talk about how to monetize and build a strong online community. Talk about Portlandia. Talk about Warlord Ski Masks and the real reason that people hate each other. And also, most importantly, how to care less about what people think about you. Hope you enjoy. If you have any questions, topics, feedback for me, because I love all that stuff, text me at 203-590 8607. Thanks for listening. Well, well, well, back for q and a with Robin Robin Altester. Why did you choose your why did you, I wanna just say Robin and I met, and then about 8 weeks later to the day almost, we got married in the courthouse. And how long did it take you to change your name? Your name was Robin Samuels. You changed it almost immediately Right. It was time to get married. Great a much better name than Samuels, Robin Aldecher. Why why did you change your name? I mean, I appreciate it. I I, I don't wanna say I'm traditional or anything, but I viewed it as a compliment that you wanted to change your name to mine in a kind of weird traditional way. Yeah. I guess I'm traditional. We're in our fifties. We have to be traditional. I'm curious. What do you think Yeah. Like, millennials are doing who are getting married now? Do you think women are changing their names? I sort of feel like it it doesn't make sense for, like, they're not getting married. Like like, our daughters, would they change their names? I don't think they would. Because they've all seen their parents get remarried and have to change their names again. Right. Right. All five of them. Who knows? I don't know. John Just marriages between us. We we you know, one time one time, some a friend of mine was asking me for relationship advice, and another friend said, why are you asking him for a relationship advice? Look. He's been married. He's been in all these relationships. That should make me qualified to give a relationship advice. I've learned from every relationship that hasn't worked out. And I haven't I haven't done anything bad. I haven't, like, haven't been reluctant about commitment or things like that. I've had good relationships. It's just for lots of different reasons, things don't work out. Right. So and you learn from the bet the good and the bad. You learn from everything. You know? The times when you don't learn, the times when I have not learned is usually when it's the longest to get over something. So when I didn't learn about my financial mistakes, it's almost like a mindset thing. Like, it's the fixed versus growth mindset when it comes to failure, even on big things like like marriage Mhmm. Or relationships or money. Like, if I lost money and I assumed, well, I had money because it was a bolt of lightning, like a lottery, and now I lost it, then I'm not gonna get out of the depression. But I feel like I think to myself, oh, I had skills to make money once, now I'm gonna learn from this Right. And I'll have even more skills. Then that's, you know That's a growth. Yeah. That's a growth mindset. And it's the same thing with marriage. Like, the times when or relationships. The times when I've ended up, like, on the floor crying, which actually has never really happened, would be the hardest. I remember one time, a relationship ended. It well, anyway, that's another story. Another story completely. What what what have you learned from from marriage from prior? We've only been married, like, a year and a half, almost to the day. A year and a year 6 months 19 days. Uh-huh. Well, what I've learned in marriage is commitment and What's that? Protection of what's that? No. I'm just kidding. Also being protective of your spouse. I think that's really important. You know, being introspective and communicating with each other rather than having to go to a third party. I think it's important to be able to to do that I think that's each other. I think by 3rd party, you mean, like, a friend. Like, oh my god. You couldn't believe what she did today. What should I do? Right. Or you can get nervous. This, really. I mean, if you can work out things together Yeah. That's even better. I agree with that. Like, I don't like going I remember in my last relationship, I would go to a therapist about the relationship, and it was always, like, here's the thing, I think in general, humans are roughly computers. And so, it was sort of like I would always go to the therapist and I would say, she did this, this, this, what should I what should I do? And the therapist would say, well, do if you do this, this might happen, then do this. If you do this, then this might happen, then do this. And it was like kinda like how you program a computer almost. And so, I got tired of that because if you need to kind of over calculate so much, a very, what should be a simple interaction with someone you're supposedly, you know, building a life together with, then that's too much work. That's right. You know, like some things are some things are hard points. Meaning, like, just because there's construction on the highway doesn't mean you stop taking the highway. It means, you know, you wait for the construction to finish or you help with the construction or whatever. This analogy is gonna totally fall apart. But but but if something's like if there's, like, nonstop blocks, you know, like, there's red lights every block for miles, it's probably not a road you wanna keep taking. Right. This really this this analogy is completely, like, do we need to plow this road? Like, it's gonna get sexual pretty quickly. So, No. You're right. I mean, I think it just should be instinctive. It should be, it it works best too when both parties are introspective in themselves. Right? And and and sit step back and take a look at, okay, well, this if he's doing this, why is he doing this? Or why am I doing this? Why am I acting this way? And then coming together. So all those those, you know, layers should be thrown out, and it should be very raw when it in terms of, commune you know, communication with your spouse. I think that's a good way to put it. The there's layers. So each one of us, we're just really this collection. We're like a a bag of skin filled with anecdotes. Right? So, like, something happens and we pull that anecdote out of this bag and, like, oh my God, after this anecdote happened, which is similar to this, then x y z happened. Yeah. You kinda have to start from scratch. And I think it's really important to realize, particularly when you, you know, sometimes it's a natural thing. Sometimes I want something from you or you want something from me. And I think it's important to realize that ultimately, yes, I care about you, you care about me, I care about our kids, they care about me, they care about you, but ultimately, that's a people very much care about themselves. Sure. So everybody wants to have their self worth validated a lot. So whether it's your boss or your partner or your children, You don't like, when I used to argue with Josie about you shouldn't go to college, she her her self worth was not being validated. She was 15 or 16 years old. She would turn around and walk away. And it was a horrible persuasion technique to just tell her, Josie, I'm your father. You need to do this. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to establish my self worth by saying, I'm your father. You need to listen to me. And she would just turn around and walk away because I just gave her this enormous power, like, me trying to convince her that I have authority. You can't just yell at someone, I have authority over here. That's like a South Park episode. There's, you know, I forget the quote. But, you have to basically, you know, and not in a manipulative way. It's gotta be sincere, but you gotta basically find out what how to communicate so that you validate their self worth and and without losing status. Like, Josie, I admire, you know, what, you know, you're thinking long term about your job. Let's look at all the different possibilities. And then and then so you agree with so and this is a very important persuasion technique. It's I'll call it the agree plus one technique. So you agree with somebody, and then you ask a question. That's the plus one. You say, Josie, I agree with you that college has been used for 50 years to get jobs. But why is it the case that since 1992, young people's salaries have gone down? Like, if you're correct and college is necessary for a good job, why have basically, every year with, you know, inflation adjusted, people ages 25 to 35, their incomes have gone down. Just tell me that, and we can and then we could figure out maybe there's something they're doing wrong and that you could you know, maybe there's a particular kind of college or a particular kind of major. So you ask a question. You you always agree, give them validation and self worth that, hey. You're right. College was used by people. It was used by me to I went to college. But why is this happening? And so you just ask a question that doesn't necessarily prove them wrong, but makes them think. So, you know, if I say to you or if you say to me, James, we love New York City. I know you love New York City, but let's say things are not open because of the pandemic through the winter, would you rather is it what do you think the average person would rather live in cold, or should we find some place sunnier or a little more comfortable? Like, you it's kind of the agree plus one technique. I think that's a very powerful persuasion technique. So if you say, you know, it's very powerful in politics. Like, you know, I I don't know. Like, if if Kanye I I am gonna use Kanye West as an example somehow. Kanye West, by the way, let's just talk about Kanye West for a second. That guy is amazing. And I'm not saying he should be president of the United States or or he should. I don't know. He's he his party is the birthday party. I wanna join the birthday party. Love that. When you think of birth so it's a that's a powerful persuasion technique. He just he doesn't I don't know what a democrat or republican when I think of that, I don't know what that looks like. You know? Fun. Right? But a birthday party I know what a birthday party looks like. Yeah. It's everyone's wearing plastic hats and blowing on whistles or whatever as things that go out and there's a cake and there's candles and we dance and my friends are there and there's music and everyone's hugging me. Like, that's the birthday party. Yeah. Of course, I gotta join. That's that's also a powerful persuasion technique, which is you take something that's very common, a political party is very common, you add a an image, a word to it that makes it very visual, and you and you make sure that it's very unique. Mhmm. So birthday party is an extremely visual image, and not only visual, but it's, like, tastes and sights Yeah. And feelings in my heart. Neuroassociation to all that. And the other thing is it's unique. No one has ever called a political party before the birthday party. Now and then he did this he did this, do you see this? Do you see this? He did this rally last night, Kanye West, and several things happened in this rally. It's, like, amazing how much news like like, even when Donald Trump, who's who's famous for creating news out of rallies, both good and bad. Mhmm. Even Donald Trump doesn't generate this much news out of a rally. Kanye West goes to this rally, and first off, he says, Harriet Tubman didn't free the slaves. And you even see in the video, like, people are videotaping him. And I watched one of the videos, and the woman was like, that's it. I'm out of here. And they left. He said, Harriet Tubman didn't free the slaves. So and then you think to yourself, is Kanye crazy? Why did he say that? Harriet Tubman, of course, is famous for building what's called, the underground railroad. Slaves would escape, and and and get to where she was on the border between the north and the south, and she would sneak them out of the South into the North where they would begin lives as free people. Mhmm. Well, here's the interesting thing. Everyone is criticizing Kanye West, but Harriet Tubman would not criticize him because he was right. Like, if you look at the history, just look up Harriet Tubman on Wikipedia. It doesn't take a lot of work. The slaves had already freed themselves. They were escaped slaves. So she didn't she didn't arrange for their escapes. She arranged for them to get over the border. She helped them get more free, and then she did, in fact, make sure they got safe and they were hooked up with jobs in the north, which is exactly what Kanye West said. He just said it in this provocative way, so everyone's yelling at him. But what did he do? He got in the news with it. If he just said Harriet Tubman was his hero, that would not have made the news. Instead, he said Harriet Tubman did not free the slaves. He's factually correct. Now we don't learn it that way in school because school teaches us to be functional idiots, but Kanye West was was smart. And then and then what did he do? He started crying about how he tried to convince Kim to have an abortion of North Kardashian, I guess. And he starts crying, and everybody's it's all over Twitter last night. Like, Kim, come get your man. He's just gone crazy. And then everyone's talking about mental illness and bipolar. Maybe he's mentally ill, maybe he isn't. Certainly, half of the US presidents have been mentally ill, like, at least some kind of narcissistic disorders or whatever. But, he wasn't mentally ill. He died in the news again. He you see you see a video of Kanye West, one of the greatest entertainers in the world, crying like I almost killed him. I almost killed her or whether it was a son or daughter. I forget. And, he got in the news with it. And he is he pro choice or is he pro life? We have no idea. He didn't give a political statement, but he got he got sympathy from both sides. And, yes, he stated he doesn't wanna fund Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is not the go to place for most abortions anyway. Back in the seventies, it might have been when it was more much more expensive. By the way, check out, my, podcast from almost a year ago with Caroline Hirsch from Carolines. She was also the producer of a movie about this group of young girls who figured out how to perform abortions in 1970, and they did thousands of abort they weren't doctors. They were like college students. They did thousands of abortions. They chose themselves to be doctors, by the way. They didn't have an MD or anything. They did thousands of abortions without one injury, fatality, anything, and they really were heroes. To be a hero, you have to go on the other side of people who say you can't do it. I'm sure all these girls were told, you can't do abortions. You're not a doctor. You can't do it. It's against the law. And they they they really were heroes for for what they were doing, and they and they did save lives because many women were getting these back alley abortions, were dying. They had a friend who had died. Anyway, Carolyn Hirsch produced the movie. Yeah. They did nothing. I remember she came on my podcast, and and I wanted to talk to her about comedy. And she was like, come on. Get going. And, she just wanted to talk about the movie. But I've since performed for an entire five shows at Caroline's at the funnest time of my life. It's a great comedy called New York City. I've also helped the GoFundMe for the employees there who were laid off. Go to Caroline's when next time it's open, which is never because New York City is a disaster area. I don't know if there are any more shootings, though, there. But I don't either. But Oh, but you know where there was a shooting was was this this was in New Jersey. Forgot the town of New Jersey. The judge who was just assigned to Jeffrey Epstein's k so Jeff Jeffrey Epstein has a lot of cases going on. So that guy not only was a pedophile, but he was laundering money through Deutsche Bank. And so Deutsche Bank is in trouble because they didn't really keep here's the thing, what people don't realize. People look at the protesters and say, these these are anarchists. Get rid of these anarchists. Let me tell you who the real anarchists are. The more money you have, the more anarchy you the the more anarchy you you can do. You're an anarchist. The more money you have, the more you're an anarchist. A great example, someone was on my podcast last week, and in the middle of the podcast, I saw this guy walk by, and it was I realized it was Dan Bilzerian. If you look up Dan Bilzerian on Instagram, he's got 32,000,000 Instagram followers. He has all these pictures of himself with girls with bikinis all lying around. And I'm like and then so he sits down, and I'm talking to the 2 of them. I'm like, where are you guys? And they said Croatia. And I'm like, I thought there was a whole ban about travel to to Europe. How do you get to Croatia? And Dan pointed to the other guy, the guy who's on my podcast, and he said, if you're this guy and you have a 224 foot yacht, you can go to Croatia. And so the billionaires or millionaires or whatever are the anarchists. And, I forgot what my initial point was with that. And oh oh, so Epstein, the bank wasn't keeping track of all his money, so they're in trouble. So a judge was assigned the case and what's really important is, you know, they always say, if you wanna know what the crime is, track the criminal and attract the money. And so obviously, if they this judge who was assigned to the case just 4 days ago, if she was, she was assigned to the case, if she really tracked down where the money was coming from, where the money was going, was the money coming from an intelligence agency? Was it going out to this charity or run by this guy or this secret company run by this guy? She would have found out a lot of things that we don't know yet about Jeffrey Epstein. And and the people that paid him money. And the people that paid him, and the people that he paid, and the people that he was extorting maybe, who knows? Who knows? Would we see Alan Dershowitz? Would we see Bill Clinton, Donald Trump? Who knows who would we see? There was then he goes all the way back to the nineties. And so 4 days after being assigned to this case, a a man shows up at her door dressed in a FedEx outfit. The door opens up FedEx truck. FedEx truck. Right? So it's totally planned operation. Her husband opens the door. The guy shoots her husband 6 times, kills her 20 year old son. She heard the noise. She was hiding in the basement, fortunately, but it was sad. It's terrifying. It's sad that her son is was died 20 year old son. And then the guy left. He didn't go in the house. The guy left. Clearly, this wasn't like a random thing. No. So and then, you know, a couple people posted this. One friend of mine, check out Tim Dillon's account. Tim Dillon tweeted about this. And then people were, like, angry, like, come on, man. Her 20 year old son just died. You why are you tweeting about this? Or come on. Jeffrey Epstein was just a random she has many cases. Jeffrey Epstein was a random case. Really? Like, Jeffrey Epstein was on a suicide watch in a federal prison and still managed to commit suicide. Yeah. I'm not saying he didn't commit suicide, by the way. I always believe the simplest explanation, but that's a high profile case. And Ghislaine Maxwell just got arrested, so this is high pro so this judge is in a very high profile case where here's the sorts of names that we mentioned, Trump, Clinton, every famous actor, professor, whatever in the world. Nazi. The the Assad, the CIA, the MI 6, Prince Andrew. Yeah. So so clearly, this case is a little bit more important than the average case. It almost makes me think, like, who are these people who are trying to say Jeffrey Epstein is not involved in this? And his girlfriend was a double agent. I mean, she was a a informer for Mi 6 and for Everything for the Mossad. Like, her dad her dad was involved in you know, dad was a billionaire, a publishing empire billionaire, and was very much involved in the establishment of, and, and the ongoing growth of Israel. Not that that's, I'm not saying anything about that, but she wasn't her family was heavily involved in geopolitical activities for many decades. And then for her to be just caught in New Hampshire, like, oh, I was just hanging why why didn't you guys call me? I'm here. I've been here in New Hampshire all the time skiing. What what's wrong with you guys? Like, she just happens to be bound in the most obvious place in the world. Like, she couldn't hide any further. But, again, it's the whole point. The billionaires are the anarchists in the world. The the people thought she was safe because she had, you know, intelligence behind her, you know, the MI 6 and Ma'am, maybe she is safe. Yay. Have you seen a mugshot? No. I we saw mugshots of Jeffrey Epstein. We show we saw mugshots in 1994 of OJ Simpson. How come we have not seen one mugshot of this woman? Like, what where where did she go? She was giving intel to all these agencies We think. During the 9 in nineties. Yeah. Yeah. We think. We don't know. But, anyway, that's horrible about this judge. But what it shows me is that that there's no nobody's nobody's, like, being discreet anymore. Like, it used to be something like this. Maybe she would be poisoned a little bit each day or something. Or I don't know. Like, the pandemic has just sort of cleaned everything out. Like, people now just say, screw it. I'm just gonna go up to her house and shoot whoever answers. Like, there's no like, obviously, that's gonna provoke a reaction. People don't care anymore, which leads me to Portland. So Portland now has an autonomous zone. There's no hate zone. Did they just move from Seattle to let's just go down I don't I don't I think I think in Portland Oh, yeah. And then the RAS guy, doesn't he have, like, a new Oh, yeah. Hustle? Oh, yeah. So update on the CHAS in Seattle. Then we'll answer some questions. Update on the Chaz. Let me just see here. Is, we we have update on the Chaz. So the the the guy who was in charge of this Capitol Hill autonomous zone in Seattle, the the newspapers called him a warlord, Ras Simone. He's just gone right now. Like, there's no tweets, no Instagrams. He was tweeting, like, 20 times a day. And and and the guy, he's not even in the news. Like, this guy let teenagers die in the jazz because he wouldn't let EMTs, you know, medical technicians come in and save lives. Why wasn't he put in jail? Like, there's so much vandalism in that whole area. Why wasn't he put in jail? He the the lives of teenagers, black teenagers, by the way, are on his head, and he's not in jail. No one's looking for him. No one cares. So I go he has a website. He has a link on Twitter. No tweets. Just a link to store.razimon.com. You know what he's selling? Ski masks. Like, who the heck is buying ski masks in the summer from a warlord? Like, let's let's start contact tracing those people. Like, what's going on? If you you you you can't even make this up, it's beyond the like, the simulation is made by, like, really great game makers because so maybe he is in Portland, but Portland here here's what the guy from the no hate zone says. Portland's a racist state because in 18/60, there were slaves there. I don't know. And then I always think of Portland as, like, the most there was Portland. It's the most liberal city. It's not racist. I don't think it was a racist thing, but they've been looting. They've been riding. Building's been put on fire. So, of course, the National Guard goes in, and the Oregon the the Portland mayor is, like, get these things out. No. There's people are being killed again. Like, he doesn't want the same thing to happen. I I'm not even saying, oh, I'm not Trump. Like, the National Guard doesn't want the same thing to happen. And people say, oh, you can't use the National Guard against Americans. Oh, really? How do you think in 1963, John f Kennedy integrated schools in Alabama? So there was an, you know, Brown versus the Board of Education. You gotta integrate the schools. Governor George Wallace of Alabama, prevented it. He would stand right in front it would be a picture of him and a little girl who who was African American who wanted to go to school. Yeah. She wouldn't the governor wouldn't let her in. He was, like, forcibly not letting his little girl in. And so John F. Kennedy called the military and escorted this girl every day for a year into the school. So there's a history of using the military in cases where the law used to enforce. Number one example, of course, being, the civil war. Number 2 example being the Whiskey Rebellion when George Washington was president. So it's not an unusual thing, and we already have precedent that the Seattle autonomous zone was lives were being lost Mhmm. And chaos was happening. And, you know, it was only when, the mayor they they they walk up to the mayor's house and said, we're gonna take over your house. Right. Within 12 hours, that jazz was cleaned out. Like, nobody was left except the garbage. And Ramon Simone is off at Ghislaine Maxwell's New Hampshire mansion and selling ski masks. Like, that guy is making a killing, selling the Raz mask. It's got the name Raz on the like, by the mouth. Like, don't mess with me. This is a Raz ski mask. I'm gonna set up the keep a scheme autonomous zone here. It's like all these people here. Wait till I get my I ordered, like, 3 red ski masks and a hoodie. So no one's gonna mess with me now, and they're from Raz Simon. I I direct I sent a DM to Rasamone. I wanted him to come on my podcast, actually. I had my Yeah. No response. That's why I'm trashing him now. It's only because of that. So, what else in the news? Well, but the virus, we're you know, we have this virus going on, and everyone and, look, we took that we unfortunately, we took the pandemic from New York City. Like, there's, like, 0 deaths now in New York City and Florida. There's rising cases. Florida is like the epicenter of the the virus. But I will say there's more cases than ever, but there's less deaths in the US than ever. Not totally true. There's a small uptick in deaths, but the numb the percentage of people who have who are who are in the hospital, who are dying from COVID 19 has gone down from, like, 20% to less than 1% all over the country. So the news is in every way, except number of cases, which makes sense because they're testing, in every way, the news is good on the coronavirus. But and and by September, October look. I I honestly in March, everybody was here. I said by April 15th, we peak. We did. I said by June 1st, it'll be gone. It isn't. I was wrong, but it's at a low. And it's kind of, like, almost treading water here, but it's in different states, it's getting lower. And, in Texas or I think it was Arizona, they stopped allowing doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine. So there was a spike in deaths or hospitalizations, but now they it's down because they're prescribing it again. And, but, you know, of course, there's no double blind study, so nobody will, pay attention. You know, you're not gonna do a double blind study in the middle of a pandemic. Like, you guys who are sick, we're not gonna give you medicine. We're gonna give you a placebo. You guys, we're gonna give you the real no no one it's unethical for doctors to do a double blind study in the middle of a pandemic. That's why they're not doing that. And so everyone's saying there's not real science here. Yes, there is. But anyway, that's another story. Well, there is a a a good, you know, news about the vaccine from Oxford. So yeah. What's the news? Well, they found out that the what they're using is giving antibodies and protecting. It's creating antibodies in in individuals. The vaccine that they've that they So so they're injecting, like, a weaker version or a dead version of the virus? I don't know. No. It's not I'm a virologist, you know, so trained on Twitter. So I could ask these questions. Stem cell, like, they're using, I don't really know exactly, but something from the virus. I got it. Actually, you you got it? Okay. So what they did was they took they took, the virus cells out of a body, maybe dead, maybe alive. They spin it until it's a stem cell. They inject it back into the body, but it still got a tiny bit of the coronavirus on it, creates the antibodies. Now if the antibodies create immunity, which is still a little unclear They are. That's what they found out. So that's the news today. That's today? Yeah. So so antibodies create immunity, and this, vaccine has a a novel method of putting antibodies into the into the body. And that oh, that's great. So that's good news. Really great news. So and they think that it's gonna be I think they ordered, like, 2,000,000, vaccines, I guess. Oh, it's great. Yeah. So let's summarize. Death's down. Hospitalization's down. We were talking to a friend of ours who's a doctor in Miami. He said 2 weeks ago, the ICU was starting to fill up, but now it's going down. It's down 40% week over week, and hopefully, that continues this week. Vaccine coming, that's great. That's great news. They're also coming from England and Oxford, so that's even better rather than from China, I feel. Yes. Rather It's more I trust them more. Yeah. And, I'm sure everyone's gonna ask if there's, like, George Soros or Bill Gates involved, but whatever. And so that's good news. The other good news is retail sales are up, jobs are up. In the economy is not great, but you care more about the direction than where it is. So, obviously, there's unemployment as much in February, unemployment was at all time lows. Right now, unemployment is higher, but but the rate is going down. So it's the direction that's important. The stimulus is working. Will they do another stimulus package? I hope so. I think we need it. I think $2,000,000,000,000 has been lost from the economy and only a minimal amount has been put back in, and yet we're still doing fine. What we're gonna see in the next few months is that the earlier stimulus package is still slowly hitting the economy, and I hope they do another stimulus package of direct checks to people, and that will be an enormous surge in the economy. It's a great time to start a business or to get skills. And, again, we're entering into the what I call the great reset. You need to develop 2 sorts of skill. You need to develop 1 of 2 sorts of skills, either hard skills, like our tech that are technical or soft skills, storytelling, marketing, copywriting, persuasion, creativity, or hard skills, programming, WordPress setup, YouTube setups, store setup. Here's a good idea for a business. And I told this to my daughter, who's never gonna listen to me. First I said to her, can you please set up a Shopify store? So it should be Shopify seems really easy to use. I'm a technical guy, but I tried you were right here. I tried setting up a Shopify store, and I got stuck after about 10 minutes. And so I said to her, but then I gave up because my my goal there was just to see how far I could get before I get stuck. That was like an experiment. So I told her, if you can get me over this 10 minute hump and finish building the store, I was in the process of uploading products. I had already made the logo, designed the logo, made it set up the template. Yeah. It was all set to go. I was gonna put my credit card in. If you could, set this up for me, then I'll pay you $1,000. But then I started thinking, Shopify is just one top type of store. Like, our other daughter, she has a store set up on Depop. Mhmm. Right? There's another company that I'm an investor in, Poshmark. There's Etsy. There's Instagram. Just set up Instagram shop. Pinterest. You can, you can buy stuff straight off Pinterest. There's the Amazon sellers program. There's there's eBay. There's, there's a dozen different mainstream online commerce sites. And here's the thing. Your local stores are closed and they're going out of business. So if you go to a local store and say, hey, I noticed you don't have an online store. You have an Instagram page, but you don't have an online store. Right now, everybody wants to buy locally because they don't want things. They don't want to waste the time, things getting shipped, or they don't want to travel to buy things. And they want to support local businesses. Set up set up online stores on every single platform. There'll be a one time cost of $3,000 and then a $100 a month maintenance, and I'll update up to 10 products a month maintenance. And then you know what you do? For store and someone asked this on, text. Someone was saying they have built up a community, in social media and wanted to know how to monetize it. And I think this is a great question. So I was gonna talk about newsletters today, but community online communities and online paid communities are extremely important. And I was just thinking actually that I should talk about this. So give me one second, where I find my notes on this. Online communities are a great way to make money. And, and it's very important. I don't really do a good there's a there's a choose yourself Facebook page. And to be honest, I don't do a good enough job building community around it. I'm I'm in a lot of really good communities online, and the people are really helpful to each other. So let me just see if I could find, my my thing. Hold on. First off, everybody, how are you guys doing? We're not look we're not seeing any of the Oh, we're not seeing the new the new things. There we go. Tony Robbins community is awesome. I didn't I didn't realize that. But I would believe it because I think Tony Robbins does a good job of connecting to people, and I've never been to one of his events. But, oh, yes. This is on, trends.co, and they're talking about, how Harley Davidson built its community. So here's here's key. So there's a couple of good, communities that I pay to join. So, podcasters paradise, I pay around $1,000 to join that. Actually, I got it for free, but, the subscription to join that community is about $1,000. And I'm in a couple other communities that are free that I don't pay, but they're very good. And then I'm in another one that I just joined, Metal International. It's like a networking group and a lot of my I saw a lot of my I get spoke at one of their conferences, and I saw that I knew everybody in there. So but I paid for that. That was, like, $1,000. And there's I was reading an article on on trends dotco, and they talk about how strong the Harley Davidson community is. If you have a strong community, this is even stronger than having, like, a great newsletter or it's side by side with having a great newsletter. Like I do an online course about self publishing or I did a few years ago and we created a community that choose yourself publishing community. And it's been pretty strong, but still not great. But people exchange ideas on books they want to write and they write the books and they share them. It's good. But so if you create a good community, you can charge for it, or you could link people to higher end products like newsletter and courses and so on. So the first thing is so this is a summary of, like, the the Harley Davidson one. Create content that is only in the community. This is hard for me because when I write something, I don't I like to let it out of the out of the can. I like to share my articles with everyone. So it's hard for me to just keep articles in one community. But if you have a queue let's say you're making a community around, you know, parenting. Okay? Right let's say it was your community. You would write articles, you know, 10 things you can do with your kids if they're not going back to school on September. And so you keep that article in valuable content in the community and people and then there's higher engagement then when they know it's only in the community and people ask questions and people help each other out. Well, I'm using this resource or I'm using this resource. So keep content, make great valuable content in the community. Connection. And this is every community I'm in, like IDW, Metal International, Podcasters Paradise, even the trends community. The the whenever I join a community, I always notice or whenever I see other people join, the the moderator of the community says, hey, everybody. James Altucher, just joined. Let's everybody welcome him. And, James, maybe describe yourself a little bit and what you're interested in getting out of this community. And, another thing, another friend of mine you know, you have to moderate too what people ask for. You don't want people to spam a community. So for instance, one friend of mine, Jason Gaignard, he has a networking community. It's the mastermind, events, and every comment posted has to either be a give or an ask. So I'm gonna give you free coaching about, setting up a podcast. So people might say that, and then they'll list, you know, their qualifications and, like, you could contact me here. Or it's an ask. Like, does anyone know, x y z? I wanna ask him to come on my podcast. There's no promotion, though, allowed. Any promotion is deleted. And so it's give or ask. There's no take. And, events. So the IDW event we're in, which limits its group to, 250 members, Every Friday, they have a Zoom event where somebody's singing, someone's doing a performing a monologue, someone's giving a lecture about what's happening politically or the virus. You know, I often give talks about my epidemiology background and the virus. So member visibility, which is you get different people in the community to tell their story. So I see that a lot in the trends dotco community, which is, oh, so and so built this business and sold it for $30,000,000. Tell us your experience. Boom. And you can't get that anywhere else. Perks. So I haven't seen this in a community, but, hey, if you're a member of the stand up New York community, we should do this. I should create a comedy stand up New York community, on Facebook. Hey. If you're in the community, you get to go to stand up New York for free, or you get 2 drinks for free. So perks are good in a community. You know, courses are good. Swag is good. Gamification is great. I I learned this in 1991. I was before the web was happening, I helped build the Internet chess server, ICC, the Internet chess club. And gamification was everything because it was about a game. So your rankings, you would get just addicted to, oh, am I getting rankings or not? Yeah. How do you think Instagram and Facebook make money? So Instagram, what's the let me ask you guys this. What is the product of Instagram? I'm just gonna wait for anybody to respond. Maybe nobody will respond. So when I ask that question, most people say, well, obviously, people could upload and keep track of photos. Photos are the product, and photo albums are the product of Instagram. That is not true. Imagine yourself as a farmer, and you put seeds on the ground. I know they're saying ads. Oh, so ads ads are not the product. Ads is the business model, but that's a good that's a good answer though. Ads are the business model and that's how they generate revenues there. And Instagram is basically an advertising agency, just like Google, just like Facebook. It's kind of a, an, an outgrowth of it's like Internet meets ad agency equals Instagram, but the real product of Instagram is likes. So someone said that. Okay. Good. So so, and not even eyeballs. The real product of Instagram is likes. You use you you use photographs to fertilize your area, fertilize your page, and then you're harvesting the likes. You're trying to generate as many likes as possible because likes give you they make you feel good. They give you dopamine. The photographs, your photographs don't give you dota dopamine. You already took them. You already had the experience. You're just uploading them on Instagram. And then what do you do after you upload a photo on Instagram? You go back again and again. How many people liked it? How you know, how many people engaged with it? Likes are the product of Instagram. The more likes Instagram has, the more money they make. So so don't ever forget that. It's not it's not about, hey. I wanna share with the world this picture of me on a boat. It's more like, I wanna put this out here, this fertilizer, so that later I could feel good because everyone else is validating me. So so likes is in is the method by which you feel your self worth grows on Instagram. And then how do you feel when somebody else gets more likes than you? Yeah. And someone says comments, it's also comments, you know, engagement in general, but I felt I find that I, for myself, notice my likes and followers more than I noticed my comments, although that's important too. And someone says vanity metrics, all these things are vanity metrics, but given everything, I'd probably like more likes than anything else. If I had to choose, followers, comments, any other types of engagement, retweets or whatever likes per photo is what gives us the most dopamine. Cause that's an immediate hit and it's 1,000 and 1,000, like right away, if you put up a good photo, if it goes viral. And so so with likes as the product, here's the interesting thing. Who do you hate or who do you envy the most on Instagram? I don't envy like someone with 30,000,000 followers because that's like out of my reach. I just like, I'm not gonna be a Kardashian, so I don't even care. I I don't I don't care about Kim Kardashian. I don't care about some some guy who's got 30,000,000, followers, but I do find myself a little bit. I'm just being honest. If someone passes me in followers or let's say they have similar followers and they post a photo and they get more likes than me on their photo, like we put up a photo at the same time, we have the same number of followers and this person gets 2,000 likes and I get 1,000 likes. I'm thinking to myself, did I do something wrong? What did they do that I can learn from? I'm feeling a little envious. Maybe thinking even, even thinking that photo was no good. Why is it getting more likes than mine? And what's interesting there in behavior is that you tend to and this is a weird thing given what's going on in society now. We tend to dislike more the people most similar to us, the people who are Competing. Superior yeah. Competing or passing us somehow. Like, think about it. There's I I have many more problems with, you know, my family than I do with my neighbors, for instance. Right? I'm not competing with, you know, someone living in in the across town. Right. But, like, somehow your family, which is similar genetically, you're similar in background, somehow you have more problems with family than you have with people who are completely different from you. Be maybe competing for also, like, attention from your parents or Yeah. Like that too. And so I think this is why people are not happy the more time they spend on social media. It's because suddenly, social media flattens the hierarchy. Like, everybody now, even whether you're Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian or you or me, everybody now does the same thing on Instagram or Twitter. We post a photo, we make a little caption, and we sit back, and we wait for likes and comments and followers. We all do the same thing. The hierarchy has been flattened. And so now it's made us all like, I'm not the president. I don't know the president. He's different from me. But, suddenly, now we're on the same platform. We're all we're he's able to talk to me on Twitter. How can I get followers just like him? And so we start to we start to deal competitive with everybody because everybody in society is on social media. So suddenly, we're all, like, arguing. Like, people are arguing. Like, people who who live in their mom's basement are arguing with, like, you know, Elon Musk about self driving cars and spaceships. And, you know, other people are arguing with Joe Biden or the president of the United States or a supreme court justice. Like, supreme court justice, I can't believe you just made that vote because you're suddenly, like, equal. You're you you feel on the hierarchy more similar, so you start you would never call up Ruth Bader Ginsburg and said, justice Ginsburg, you better vote for this. But on Twitter, no problem because it's the hierarchy's plan. That's why hierarchies Plus, there's a lot of anonymous people. Yeah. All the anonymous people hide the their real identity, which is such a cowardice. Yeah. Yeah. Like thing. Like, balls 656 Yeah. Will say, you're a scumbag, James. I know. And it's like, who are you calling a scumbag? What how come? Why? By the way, once you defend yourself, you give the other person status, and they got exactly what they wanted from you. So do not defend yourself on social media. Instead, try the agree plus one technique I described earlier. Agree with them? You know, I'm probably could improve myself a little bit, but let me ask you, like, you know, what is the best thing you've done in your life? I I don't know. But, How about not responding at all? Yeah. No. Ignoring time. You know what the best technique is when I'm playing online poker? The absolute most powerful technique, and it works on social media too. I simply put my headphones on and listen to someone else. So, oh, it's my turn again. No good hand, fold, back to listening to Apakaz. Oh, it's my turn again. No good hand, fold, back to listen. If you pay attention, you get bored and you feel like you have to do some, oh, I better play that. I'm kinda bored or I better respond. I'm just looking at Twitter for a reason. I'd have to respond to everybody. But if you you always have to diversify the things that are actually important and and pay attention to them and and instead of being focused on the thing you're trying to to ignore or to to get better. Yeah. But this is the thing about getting better at something. If you try to get better at comedy or you try to move up at your office by the way, when you're at your office, let's say you're a junior junior whatever, You don't get angry at the CEO. If you don't get a promotion, you get angry at your coworkers because they got one or they might get one, or they're gonna be laughing at me behind my back if I don't get one. So you're always competing against people and you're and you're envious or you're not liking them or you're arguing with them or you're resenting them or you're thinking, hey, well, I'm gonna get promoted before this guy. I never say to myself when I was at a corporate job, I never said to myself, well, if that guy could be CEO, I could be CEO because he was he was, you know, 8 bosses above me. Like, I wouldn't think to myself, like, oh, I'm just gonna jump right to be Right. CEO of HBO because I deserve it. Yeah. But I would say if someone got promoted, I'm like, I'm I'm due also for a promotion. Where is it? Like, that guy is not better than me. That's why they say climbing the corporate ladder. You're just climbing. Right. And the thing is you're climbing it not by standing on the heads of the people way above you or way below you. You're just standing on the heads of the people right at your level, and you have to stand on those heads. Competition and anger is among people most similar to you. If I set up an ecommerce store, right, let's say I wanna set up a store just selling little books that I write. Okay. I'm not competing with Amazon. I don't care about Amazon. But I am thinking, like, why did that Etsy store get more traffic than my Etsy store? You know, that's when you start feeling resentful, and there's good sides. You could learn from that also. But it's always good to keep in mind, try to stay out of the hierarchy. Try to avoid being on autopilot where you're just like, boom, boom, boom, up the hierarchy. 1st, I'm a, junior programmer, then a senior programmer, then a manager, then a project manager, then a director, then a VP. Stay off the hierarchy as much as you can. Or even if you're on a hierarchy, you're at the tennis club, and you're moving up the ladder in tennis, try to figure out ways to to stay off the hierarchy. Try to always have that playful sense of wonder, like, how could I learn? And and and the big the big thing is having self recognition that you're just putting yourself on the hierarchy, having self recognition that the people you're gonna resent are the people that are at your level. So being aware of that helps you to resent them less. Good. So It's a good lesson. Good good lesson. Good. Good lesson. Good. Thank you. Thank you, missus Altucher, the teacher. But, yeah, the point is community. And don't aid people at the same level as you. This is why, by the way, you know, I don't know how many of you have ever had a a mentor. So throughout my career, I've had maybe 4 or 5 different real serious mentors, like, people I looked up to that I respected, even loved. It's like almost like a surrogate parent, and I almost felt like I was like a surrogate son to them. A 100% of the time, they ended up hating me because They were competing. Because at some point, you're moving up and they're slowing down because they're getting a little older. So suddenly, you're starting to be a little bit more similar. The trend is that you're getting more similar. People only fight people similar. Like, now there's exceptions, of course. You know, you don't like the chairman of China, but it's not like you're gonna call him up and say, I hate you. Like, you could do it because you're both on Twitter, maybe. You go on on was it I I even have an account, Weibo. Is Weibo still used by Chinese people? I'm on Weibo. I have, Kai Fu Lee. Yeah. Weibo ed me out there, and I got, like, a few 1,000 followers. Wow. I gotta get Jay, why aren't we translating my Weibo into my Twitter into Weibo tweets? Get get working on that. Are Jay, are Malaysians part Chinese? Did you come from China? They are. It's like the Chinese one up to Malaysia? There you go. Did Genghis Khan, like, unify them all? No. I don't think so. We only learned this in history 6000 times, but history is useless. So some questions I'm gonna answer because we only have a few minutes left. Here's a question for you. All my life, I've struggled with caring too much, about what others think. How can I go about caring less about what others think? So I've just described a technique, which is recognize you only really care about what others think when you're kind of in the same class as them, the same status on the hierarchy. So remove yourself from the hierarchy, no matter what you do, always differentiate yourself. Always say, how can I avoid competition, which takes up too much of my resources in my brain to be different? If I'm different from everyone else, I don't have to focus on what they're doing. I can just focus on what I'm doing. Of course, there's the cliche, no one's thinking about you as much as you are. But who knows? Maybe it's true. You know what? Everyone yeah. You know, when you ever go to a party and you don't wanna dance because you're thinking, oh, everyone's looking at you. You like to dance at a party, though. But Yeah. I'll take it. And you know what? Here's the truth. I look at other people dancing and I'm thinking to myself, that guy's an idiot. He should not be dancing. I really am thinking, like he was thinking beforehand, no one's really thinking about me. Yes, they are. I am looking at you right now. I am staring at the way you're moving. You're you've got the white man rhythm, whatever that is. I'm being racist against white people. It's okay. I'm Jewish, so not entirely white. But, and you're allowed to be racist against white people now, apparently. So, no, I'm Jewish is different. I'm Semitic. So, so the key is just try to even you now that you know this dynamic exists, try to even write down on your 10 ideas a day. What are all the ways that I'm different? Or, you know, if you're worried about dancing, take a dance class online. Go to go to my favorite is I take these classes. Go to YouTube and Google Pop and John, and he will teach you pop and locking and waving and breakdancing tutorials. They're great. I love this guy, Pop and John. But the thing is is that they're talking about everything, not just dancing. Right. So so but in general, I'm saying, remove yourself from the hierarchy and differentiate yourself. So another thing I try to do is, first off, I I there's a lot of things. Again, everybody cares about their own self worth. Even if they care about you, it's like 5% you, 95%, their own self worth, best case. So if you're always thinking to yourself, okay, maybe this person's watching me, maybe I'm worried what they think about me, but what they really worry about is they might not like me because they wanna join the group of all the people laughing at me or making I see this on Twitter all the time. Yeah. People say crappy things about me because then they join the group of people, like, they they they think their other Twitter followers will laugh with them or whatever. They're they're only it's only about their self worth. So if you reward people, not for bad behavior, but if you just if you just always think about the people who you're worried about and and make sure you don't pander to them. You don't say, oh, man. You're so great. You do a little research. Find, like, hey. I hear you know, you use the Benjamin Franklin technique. I hear you like, Ernest Hemingway. Do you happen to have a copy of Farewell to Arms? I'd love to borrow it. Now you've validated their self worth a little bit, and you're asking them a favor. So the Ben Franklin bias is if they do the favor for you, they become the sort of person who does favors for you, so they become more inclined to like you. So there's just just be aware that they're worried the reason anyone thinks about you is they're thinking about their own self worth first. So always acknowledge that. Again, you don't pander. You be sincere, but do the research so you could communicate to them and and so on. It's really it's about confidence in yourself. Right? So it's good just to humanize people. Like, you're if you if you're worried about somebody, you know, not liking you or you're just self conscious around them, you really need to stop and think what is it about them that really makes you nervous or why do you care? And then you need to really think about it and, like, are they acting a certain way? Well, if you understand why people act a certain way, like, if they're rude or if they're just loud or whatever. There's always a reason why they're acting that way. So when you really understand how people work, right, it really does help you humanize people and and so then you're not nervous as much because they're just like you. Yeah. Well, I always Without really, you know, thinking about, you know, how to do things. It's just like you really like bullies. I told my kids the reason why they're bullies is that they're they are insecure or someone is rude and says something on my Facebook or whatever. I know that person is not a happy person inside. So I I I kind of feel sorry for him. You know what I mean? If they say something. So I I just you gotta look at it that way and and humanize them. Right. And I I think I think you you that's true. You have to humanize them. I think the worst thing you can do is pander to them, like, oh, hey, Johnny. You're great. Or hey, Jackie. You're great. Yeah. Then the second worst thing you can do is try to validate yourself. Like, try to brag like, hey, guys. Guess what I did this weekend? I won the the miniature golf competition in my yacht club or whatever. Like, the worst thing you can do is try to brag or or pander. But if you do your research on them, you can find information about them and and ask them about it. And that builds their self worth. The other thing that's good is to completely ignore them. Is to put put on the headphones and just ignore them because nobody likes being ignored because, again, their self worth is affected. So they'll try similarly, they'll try to validate themselves for you. So, you know or you can do what's called qualifying them. Like, you know, what you know, confronting someone and saying, you know, what are your what are your qualify you know? Hey. I wanna, you know, get to know you. But what are your qualifications for being here? Like, if you're in the workforce or, you know, let's say you're in a bar meeting, a woman or a guy or whatever, and they say, oh, I'm a a lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein. You can say, well, what makes you qualified to be a lawyer for a pedipal? How are you gonna get him off? Like, so to speak. You think that's Pun intended. Friend. So It's not a very good thing to say to make friends with a lawyer. True. True. I was making an extreme example. Make them qualify themselves for you. Don't try to qualify yourselves for them because that goes that's the status direction. But it's basically if you just sit back and just Probably the best thing in that case is to ignore them. If you're Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer, forget it. See you later. I'm going to meet my husband anyway, James, because he's home wondering where the hell I am, and I'm hanging out with a pedophile's lawyer. So we got we got 1 minute left. I I had more questions to answer, so we'll be back tomorrow. I think we're gonna be doing these probably 3 time 2, 3 times a week. And then Friday, I was gonna describe more completely about newsletters, and I'll go over community a little bit more tomorrow on how to monetize communities. I think what I'm gonna do is every Friday on my podcast, I'm gonna release a podcast called Side Hustle Fridays. And the very first one is gonna be about newsletters. So I don't know yet if it's gonna be this Friday I'm gonna release it or next Friday. But thank you all for coming here, trying to build a community, for these q and a podcasts. These Instagram shows are, put on my feed, but then also Jay is gonna put on the podcast. And we have a lot I'm interviewing Andrew Yang in 2 days. I'm very excited about that. So if you have any questions for me, for Andrew Yang, let me know, and see you guys later.