Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. You've had a podcast for a long time. Yeah. You have a lot of listeners. A lot of people know who you are. You probably get really, you know, nice compliments all the time about your podcast. Mhmm. When do you start to say, okay, I'm a little less ambitious now. I don't need as I'm not gonna go all out to have like, you've done a really good job creating your your audience. When do you say, okay. I'm not gonna put 20 hours a week into building audience anymore. I'm gonna put maybe an hour or 2 a week in or or 0 in. It's funny. I just started doing that, and it's been this very difficult internal conversation, not always internal, but conversation because I see other podcasters or other social media people, and I and I hate social media, but I'm gonna use them by way of comparison because I do use them by way of comparison. Yes. And I go, man, look at this person has so much engagement. Maybe I should have done something like that or should do more like that. And then I go, no. I've got kids. I don't like creating for Twitter or for Instagram or for TikTok. What's the point? Even if I doubled my audience by executing a brilliant strategy doing this, Do I need to do that? Financially? No. Okay. So then what's the reason I'm doing it? Ego. Is that a good reason to do it? Probably not. But it's not a terrible reason. I mean, look. If that's what you find fulfilling, cool. Oh, wait. I have to take that time away from my 2 young kids? Not worth it. I mean, so you've reached some tipping point in your ambition. Like, I remember when you switched podcasts, like, you were doing the art of charm and then you left that and restarted from scratch, the Jordan Harbinger Show, and you did an incredibly good job building up. Like, you were you were the definition of hustling. Like, you were calling podcasters like me and saying, hey. Let's do a podcast swap. And you were you were you were very proactive, like, asking me, like, hey. What could we do together to and you explained the situation, and you wanted to get your audience up, and I'm sure a lot of people helped you. You were very good at asking. Yeah. I had to be. Better than I would be at at asking. Like like, it it didn't feel like a drag. Like, oh, no. I gotta figure out how to return Crap. Like, OM one, this sucks. I'm dreading yeah. I have those days too. Yeah. I had to be good at asking because I was like, I'm in trouble, man. This is a that was a dire situation. Right? I was starting from scratch, and I thought I spent 11 years building my first show. Is it possible to get back to where I am now? And and that show you know, this is before podcast ads. If you think about it, podcast advertising really did kick up in the last 5 years. Before that, it was kinda small. You were kind of in trouble if you were living off your podcast ads. So I had to reboot the whole show, pay my team, and I was like, oh, maybe I'll make, like, a modest like, a low six figures. That's cool. It'll that's totally fine. And then advertising started to really take off, and the show started to take off. And I was like, okay. Good. I'm you know, I'm lucky I had that. But I had to do that. So that wasn't like, oh, I'm kinda shy. I'm feeling a little weird about that. I was like, I'm gonna starve to death if I don't ask for help. Like, what were what were the like, again, asking is hard. Like, a lot of people will pour their life into writing a book for instance. Mhmm. And their publisher will say, okay. Now you need to call up all your podcaster friends and ask them to go on a podcast. For for me, this is impossible. I cannot do it. So what what would you say were the most effective methods you used really for asking for for help, and and which things helped the most? So I it's funny because I put this in I actually put this into my free course as a module because people are like, I'm I'm just not good at asking. So one of the things that I do is I tell people that you you start by helping other people. You dig the well before you get thirsty. Right? So that when you have to ask somebody for something, it doesn't feel as bad because you're like, well, I've helped them before. It's not like this weird thing where I'm coming out of nowhere. I'm like, hey, James. Remember me from high school? Fun times. Anyway, I'm selling multilevel marketing company protein shakes. You wanna be a distributor. Like, you're not doing that. You know? So help other people. You you build a little bit of referral currency, so to speak. It's not as weird. You're not coming to people with tail between your legs. Like, you haven't talked to them in 5 years. Now you want something. The other thing you can do that I didn't need to do as much because I'd already built this sort of infrastructure of, like, having helped a bunch of other people in the past or at least, you know, kept in touch with people well. One one cheat, though, when I give this to people to try for themselves is I say, what if you ask for something for someone else to just sort of kick the rust off of your asking muscles? So, like, if you really need help with something, like, you need your book distributed. Okay. That's a tough ask. But if you if you know you're gonna have to do that in a year because you're writing the book, start by going, hey, James. I know you've got an eye for art, and you bought a bunch of art. Do you think this is a Banksy? Who would I even ask? And you're like, oh, yeah. Shoot me this thing. So I'm asking you for this sort of low stakes thing, or you might go, I don't know. And I go, oh, well, cool. I just thought I'd shoot you a photo of this thing. I thought I saw that looked like a Banksy. Whatever. Another cheat that you can do is you can ask for help for someone else. So let's say that you need to ask for help from somebody, and you know that somebody's really good at they work for Microsoft, and they design, I don't know, touch screens. You're asking them for help with something else, but you're like, hey. My mom just got this Microsoft Surface, and it freezes a lot. Can you any idea what might be causing that? And he goes, oh, let me you know, sure. I'll help your because you're gonna ask for help for your mom. Why why wouldn't you? It's your mom. So it feels easier to ask your neighbor or whatever to help out your mom with something than it is to ask your neighbor, like, hey, can you promote my thing? Can you do something for me? So ask for help for somebody else and or ask for something really low stakes where if the person says no, it's not a big deal, but also it's really easy for them to say yes. Like, if I if I send you a photo of a street sign that's painted, and I say, is this a Banksy? You might go, oh, I've seen that before in a catalog. That looks like a Banksy, or no. No. No. This is nothing I've ever seen, but maybe you could ask this may maybe you'd inter here's a guy who works at Sotheby's. He would know. You know, that kinda thing. By the way, what happened to all that art? Remember that art you bought, that big estate sale? You bought all that art? Yeah. So so so the story is and it's it's interesting to ask because I was just thinking about this. Supposedly, it was some Cornell art professor who collected art that like an Andy Warhol, for instance, or a Dali or even a Picasso, but there was no provenance, meaning there was no proof that it was a Picasso. So there's a lot of, you know, Picasso made something like 60,000 works of art. A lot of things don't, you know, the Picasso Foundation or family office or whatever doesn't acknowledge that these are Picassos. So he collected these things, I guess, in the hopes that maybe they would turn out to be real or whatever. But what I'm suspecting is that they're all fraudulent. That's fascinating. Wow. And I and they're and they're really good. Like, I even I have a Banksy or or quote unquote Banksy. I have a I have a Jackson Pollock. I have, oh, not nothing. I have a Jackson Pollock over there in my office, but it's not really a Jackson Pollock. Right. And we had an insurance agent come and put an insurance value on all these things. The only thing that had the only paintings that had any value that weren't that we owned, that they were not part of this collection. There were 3 paintings painted by North Korean artists. And just because the North Korean aspect gave them some financial value, but nothing else had any value at all. And now that doesn't mean she was an art expert, she's just said if without a history of where this art comes from, we have no idea if it's fraudulent or not. My guess is That's interesting. All fraudulent. And I'm curious, did one person do it? Did many people do it? I'm sure there's, like, a story behind each painting. Like, how who who are is did the forgery, and what's their background? I kinda just wanna, like, do a documentary tracking it all down. I think that's, like, a a fun idea. It is a fun idea, and I'll tell you I'll tell you what. One, I have a lot of North Korean art because I went to North Korea a bunch, and I bow always bought art there because it's better than the crappy souvenirs you can get that are, like, ceramic North Korea flags. So I wonder if that stuff's worth anything. Because all everything you get there is hand painted. Right? Like, even if it's not fine art, it's a propaganda poster, but it's painted by a human because they don't print them. They have unlimited free human labor, so they make people paint them. And I wonder what those are worth. And I have, like, what is it called when you stitch something and it turns into a giant flowered landscape? Like, cross stitch, but it's not on that plastic background. It's like somebody is painstakingly crafting this giant floral landscape out of different colored thread. It's something like that. So I have that stuff that I get that I've given to my mom and whatnot. But I think that would be really interesting, and I wonder if this is an art professor, was he a skilled artist himself? Because what a plot twist if he was the one who was forging all these and the reason that he had them was he couldn't sell them because they were forgeries. And he was like, I'm just not gonna tell anybody. I'm just gonna keep all these art pieces of art up here. What if it's him? It it it could be, or I'm not even totally sure he exists. It could be the auction house was doing something fraudulent. So because I was buying into a fraudulent, through an auction house and there was all these supposed bugs in their website and that's how I got them, like, super cheap. Like, they didn't send nobody knew the auction was happening right then and we just happened to be, quote unquote, lucky. And we didn't spend that much money because again, we don't know if there's any value. But, oh, here like here's an example that we got in this auction. There's a menu from Studio 54, which is this famous New York City club in the eighties, and, you know, everybody famous would would go there all the time. And basically, like Andy Warhol did a sketch on the back of this menu, of Studio 54. It's like an odd if that was a forgery, it's like an odd cons conception even of a forgery. Mhmm. So, like, maybe maybe that might be, like, real, but it's not really worth anything because it's just a sketch on the back of the menu. But I don't know. But I I really wanna get to the bottom of this story and, just haven't just haven't done it. And but it reminds me one time I was, I was single and I was in a bookstore at Barnes and Noble in New York City. It was at the Starbucks in the bookstore, and the girl sitting next to me was drawing something and it was really amazing. And I said, oh, that's amazing what you're drawing. And but, you know, I was trying to talk to her. Sure. And she we we end up talking and she tells me this incredible story where she said she worked for and she named a famous artist. I didn't I hadn't heard of him, but when I searched, he was, like, super famous. His paintings would go for, like, let's say $100,000 a painting. Wow. And she said what he would do was he would take photographs of basically these naked women in, like, very exotic, you know, places, like, in nature or whatever. And then her job was to paint he would blow up the photograph to be, like, you know, 5 feet by 5 feet, and her job was to paint over the photograph exactly what the photograph was. So it it so then he would sell them pretending it was a super realistic painting of these nudes. Like, he wouldn't admit he wouldn't say to anybody, this is really a photograph underneath it, and another artist painted over it to duplicate the photograph. Wow. And then he'd sell and and her point her what she said is he after you he sells it for a 100,000, it's not like anyone's gonna chip away at the paint True. To see that there's a photograph underneath. And so he would get away with it. And as for for all I know, he's still getting away with it. And and I I wrote about this without naming her. I wrote about this in a column I have in the Financial Times, and I I started getting death threats from her friends because they're like, how how could you out her like this? And I said, I didn't name her name, but they said she everybody's suspicious of her now and she's denying it and blah blah. And then she said, you need to meet me. Like, I need to know why you did this. And I did ask her out when we met, but she said there is no way So mission accomplished. You guys ended up going out. Well Yeah. I mean it was it was not a friendly it was not a friendly moment. No. But, but that was, like, 20 years ago. So, it was it was I'm I'm sure she's on to bigger and better and more productive things than helping some, you know, criminal artist. But there's just a lot of weird things going on out there. And you know this because you can podcast about it. It's funny you should mention this. So this morning, I got an email from a former show guest who is a really, really, really good art forger, formally, I should say. Like, a really, really good art forger. So what he did I'm trying to remember the story because I did a podcast with him years years ago. His name is Ken Perenni. And what he did was he he turned out to be a really good painter, and he just wanted to paint. And he ended up getting involved with, like, the mafia back in the nineties or whatever it was. And he's painting these old masters, which is like, I don't know, you paint a ship on a stormy water or something, and he was doing it so well that all of these art connoisseur, whatever, auction house people were going, this is a lost, I don't know, Rembrandt or whatever. I don't know who the old masters are or whatever. The the Rembrandt, whatever. And they'd be blown away, and then they would get auctioned off. And I know a lot of people are thinking, wait a minute. There's all these ways to tell if a painting is fake. Come on. He had all these really cool ways to fake genuine elements of a painting. So he would go to thrift stores or flea markets. He would go and buy any framed painting because the wood is old, the canvas is old, the staples are old if there's even staples in there, nails, whatever it is. And he would either paint over the old one on that canvas in the same style so that he didn't have to, like, bake the you know, he's not making fake frames, fake nails, fake he just finds old stuff and then recreates it, or he would get the old paint off somehow. And there was what was this one thing that was so cool that he did? So, apparently, old paintings, if you put them under a black light, the varnish shows up really kinda weird and creepy and green because it's I don't know. It's old varnish. It's got some chemical in it, whatever. So what he would do is he would take an old he would take a solvent, put it over an old painting that he got at a flea market, dissolve the varnish that was over the top of the top of the of the painting, drip it into a container, and then he would paint that over one of his forgeries so the auction house people would be like, oh, we're gonna put this under our special impossible to fake black light that shows that the varnish is old. Sure enough. The varnish was old. It was just moved and put on a new fake painting. And he did that with old frames, old nails, old canvas. And so his paintings, he says to this day, he'll look at an art catalog, and it'll be like, we're auctioning off this beautiful, you know, 1845, 19, whatever it is, painting. And he's like, nope. I freaking made that. That's mine. I made it. So why why did he call you today? I emailed him a long time ago to see what was going on because speaking of small world and and big podcast or whatever, I get this tweet from a woman who is, like who who has the same last name as him, but is is very dark, black, African, like, American looking gal. Okay? Like, very and and he's a very white looking pasty dude. And she says, by the way, I just heard the episode. I love your show. I've been listening for years. I just heard the episode with my dad who adopted me when I was a baby. I had no idea that this was what how all this went down. She's like, I knew he was an artist so that he did something shady, but I had no idea that he was, like, into it at this level. And she found out from my podcast that she already listened to it. It's not like he sent it to her or somebody else sent it to her. She was already a fan of the show. Her dad pops into the feed, and she's like, what? Listens to it and finds out that her dad is, like, this super deep with the, you know, mafia art forger back in the day before she was born. Crazy. And so he never told her. He never like, what does he what did he do after that? What did she think he did? That's a really good question. I'm not sure what he did after that. I know he paints commissions, but he's very sort of hush-hush about what the commissions are. And I'm not gonna accuse the guy of anything because I don't know if he's doing anything, but, man, would it be tempting to continue doing what you're doing? Because he was living the high life. He was hanging out with Andy Warhol. He was hanging out with a lot of these famous artists, and they were like, wow. You're really talented, and you're underrated. And so one of the reasons he started doing the forgeries is because he just needed the money, and that was it. Well, how much would he get paid? Like, the how much would the mafia pay him? So that's a really good question. I don't remember all the exact this I did this interview probably, like, 4 plus years ago, so it's a little bit fuzzy. But I remember one of the things that the the mafia was kind of a trap because it wasn't like, yes, he was painting these things and he was getting them listed in auction houses. The mafia wanted more of, like, an industrial pipeline. It was like finish this now, do this other one, you know, and they're not like, we're gonna be really generous with you because we can. They're more like, you work for us now, and if you don't want like that, we're gonna, you know, beat you up or whatever, or worse. And so the feds are chasing him. The mafia's chasing him because he eventually just disappears. He goes to Europe, and he's like, I'll be you know, he just slips out. He knows they're watching him. He just slips out, goes to Europe, and stays there, I think, in Amsterdam for, like, a year or 2. He just didn't want any part of it. That was enough for things to just die down. Yeah. I think they just went, we're on to the next scam. You know? But he he had to watch his back for a while. I he was making tens of 1,000 of dollars, I would imagine, per painting. Because these, one, they take a long time. I don't I don't do any art myself, but I I apparently, these things take weeks to months to really do it right. And, you know, it's gotta dry, and it's gotta be done perfectly well. I don't think you just settle down in an afternoon and paint an old master forgery and then bake it in an oven the next day, and you're good. I think there's more more to it. Okay. I'm gonna match story for story because so this is the case of a woman who didn't know what her father did. So I had a a friend. She was like my personal assistant for a while. And she, you know, when I met her, she she told me, oh, I don't have well, she was just talking about her family. I don't have the best relationship with my dad, but you may have heard of him. He's, like, this famous poker player slash backgammon player, whatever. And I'm, like, oh, yeah. I've heard of him. And completely separately, about a year later, I'm meeting with a bunch of business guys who are somewhat in the collectibles business, but like high end high end collectibles. And they tell me that about this guy who's secretly, like, very quietly and this is, like, maybe almost 10 years ago. They're talking about this guy who's actually the richest guy in the world. Because what he did in the eighties, in the early eighties, when every country in South America was 1 at a time going bankrupt, he would go down to the country and say, okay, you need cash. You need American dollars to pay down your debts. I will give you cash, but you have to sell me all of your gold at 10¢ on the dollar. So he bought like like, he would go down to, let's just say, Argentina. I don't know which countries he went to. He would go to Argentina, and he would say, you know, gold's worth, let's say, $500. I'll pay you $50 per ton or whatever whatever it is Yeah. Ounce. And and you and I'll buy all of your gold. And and, apparently then, he brought all I don't know how he shipped things around, but he brought all of the gold to Las Vegas. He rented out an entire hotel in Las Vegas and filled up the entire hotel with gold bars Holy. All of these South American countries. And the reason I know this and the reason I know that it's not BS is that I was talking the person who told me this story was the guy who counted the gold for him. He's like a a collector who he's like an expert collector, one of the most experts on collectibles on the planet. And so he was hired to count the gold and make sure it was all legit. Wow. And so he saw the gold, and he said, look. This guy then, you know, did this, this, this, and became the richest guy in the world. I don't know if he still is, you know, compared to, like, the Elon Musk and so on. The richest richest guy in the world. And I asked I I went back to my friend. Let's call let's say her name was Janet. I went back to Janet, and I said, do you what what did you say your dad does again? And she's like, well, he he plays poker. He plays games. He's like a gambling guy in Las Vegas. And I'm like, did you know that he's actually the richest guy on on the planet? And and she's like, what are you talking about? And she had no idea about any of this, and she didn't even have, like, such a great relationship with her dad. Sure. She's like, I never heard any of this, but it is weird, like, that, you know, every now and then she gets a sense he has some money. Like, for instance, when she visits him, he has an entire apartment building with, like, hundreds of apartments, and it's just him and his friends. Like, you you his friends visit and they just pick up keys for any of the apartments and just stay for as long as they want. Like, that's this is a weird life. And That sounds like a money laundering because it's a bad investment. So I'm like, okay. Why are you keeping an empty apartment building? That's like money laundering stuff right there. Yeah. Or or he just had so much extra money Yeah. And he just wanted his friends to visit him whenever they wanted. Yeah. He just left the building open, you know, pick up keys for whatever rooms are available and so on. So but then after that, guess what? She rebuilt her relationship with her dad and basically stays with him most of the time now. But that's also an extreme story of someone who didn't know what what her father did. There there's a lot of that. Kids don't know what I do, but they don't care. So that's a difference. That's different. It's different if they they could know and they simply don't care. That's different. That's a different story. Right. My 3 year old somebody asked him what your daddy does, and he says my daddy talks into the microphone. So he kind of knows. He kinda knows. Right. He's figured it out. That that that that talking to a microphone makes makes some money. Yeah. But and, you know, this is an interesting thing because this comes up a lot with AI now. AI could, of course, compose music that is indistinguishable from Mozart. It could probably paint paint things indistinguishable from a Van Gogh or whatever. So so it could probably write stories that are decent. And so so all of these skills are becoming commodities, which is unfortunate. But what's not gonna become a commodity is exactly the stuff we're talking about right now. Like, living an interesting life and having interesting experiences, that can't be commoditized. Like, sure, AI could make up stuff, but the things AI makes up are still based on what it's been trained on. Sure. So it'll be hard in you know, every year, there's new sets of unique and interesting experiences on the frontier of interesting experience. And so to live a life, let's say, worth living, we still have the edge, and we always will have the edge over AI because we're the humans actually living and having interesting experiences, and AI is not gonna have an interesting experience. I think that's true. I mean, there's a reason that true crime is a popular genre. And I'm sure fake crime and fictional crime is popular, but true crime has really taken the world by storm. Why? Because it's true. The most popular podcast category, for instance. By far. So if that's the most popular podcast category, let's because it's true, people are going to value things that are not created by a machine that are real in a certain way. It doesn't mean that most things won't be able to be created by a machine. You know? Look. A machine can probably eventually do my voice. It'll be able to tell humorous stories, but it won't those stories won't be based on my real life experience, most likely. They'll be based on the AI generated. This is a thing that Jordan Harbinger would have done back in the day, maybe. We'll see. So so there's that, but it's less interesting for a lot of folks because it's not real. And Yeah. That's interesting. The lived experience is gonna be something that people then value possibly even more once there's unlimited amounts of AI generated stuff. There's a reason that elephant painting you know, you ever seen where it's like an elephant painted this. That's worth something because an elephant did it. If a human did it, you'd be like, this is not really a good talented person who painted this. This is a Right. This is pretty basic. But since an elephant took the brush in its trunk and then painted it, it's worth a freaking fortune. It's going to be something along those lines. There might be our jobs will change, but they won't necessarily go away, at least not in the short term. I I think Derek Thompson at the Atlantic was writing about this. He's like, you know, my job's not gonna go away. I'm just gonna have to turn b minus AI generated articles that are written in my voice into a minus generate AI, prompted articles that are edited by me, and then I add my actual flare to it and make up the certain x factor that is what he writes about that AI can't do. Well and, also, he can go out and experience things. Like, if he's writing about the war in Ukraine, he could go to Ukraine and experience it. Right. And write about that experience. AI will never be able to do that. And, you know, this is always, you know, we were talking earlier about ambition and and so on. To some scent in some sense, when we're a podcaster, we're busy podcasting, so we're not living as interesting a life as maybe we did before. Yeah. Like, before my podcast, I would, you know, try building other companies, or I would, you know, go go broke, or I would, you know, go on this trip and weird things would happen. You would get kidnapped and talk your Right. Self out of being a hostage. Like, you don't do that now because now you're doing a bunch of podcasts. And I got kids. I'm trying not to get kidnapped. I got kids. Right. Right. So so things change as you get older, and, I wonder if you ever wonder, like, hey. Okay. I'm interviewing all these people who have interesting life experiences. Do I need to like, sometimes I wonder, do I need to kind of try again having you know, I feel like I've taken a little step back from having, you know, interesting experiences. Yeah. I I try to it it is hard. I don't go to North Korea anymore. It's too dangerous. Can't go to China, especially for me. It's too dangerous. But I I just for you. Oh, because you you do podcasts about China. Right. And, like, I'm not gonna be on I'm definite I'm definitely on their s**t list at this point talking about the communist party and the shortcomings and news from China that's not supposed to make it out of China. You know, there's a lot of stuff like that on the Jordan Harbinger show feed that they don't like. I've had Uighur activists on their human rights lawyers. You know, they're they're not gonna they they don't they're not gonna like that at all, and I don't wanna risk hostage diplomacy with me at the for in front of that. I don't I don't need that. Right. So but I I just got back from Morocco. I went to the Amazon, but I'm going to Mongolia. You know, I've got a lot of things that are on the on cool. The sort of, like, off the beaten path. But, yeah, it's not the same as when I was back in the day showing up in yugo former Yugoslavia with a backpack and a little bit of cash and being like, I'm just gonna sleep in this park tonight. You know? That that was that was stuff for my twenties that I can't slash won't do anymore. Yeah. Sometimes I feel like I I no. You know, like, I I had, you know, a lot of interesting experiences in in my forties or whatever. Like, you know, particularly when I threw out all my belongings and would just stay in Airbnbs. Yeah. I remember that. Things that happened. You've the duffel bag days. You lived in the with a duffel bag. Yeah. And so so I I wonder about all of these things, but I've just been I've just been more tired lately. Not tired physically, not as ambitious in my brain. Yeah. But I I like podcasting. Like, how many podcasts do you do a week right now? I do 3. I mean, I've released 3. Right? I but sometimes time's out for you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't do anything else. I play with my kids, and I do the show. You know? I I record 2 interviews or well, it depends. I release 2 interviews. I do my Friday advice stuff where people write in. And, and then in 2023, I'm gonna do more of these I do call them Skeptical Sundays where we talk about, like, something that most people either don't know about or hold dear, like the Olympics. And we're like, this is why the Olympics are a freaking sham. Or energy drinks. These things are terrible for you. Here's the science behind it. Or here's a bunch of banned foods in the United States and why they're banned, or what's the ingredient that's banned, stuff like that. And it's sort of like it's kinda like Adam ruins everything if you remember that show, only No. There was there was a show with a comedian Adam Conover, and he would sort of talk about why certain things were bad or bad for the environment or bad for you or destructive or didn't do the thing you thought they did. So it's it's kind of like that, only I've got a fact checker and a comedian who does a show with me, and he'll go deep into, like we'll we'll talk about how psychic readings work or how what tarot cards really are, which is, you know, exactly what you think it is, nothing, or an excuse to give somebody a cold read that you are using, you're using the cards as a breaking off point and a distraction for them. But, really, you're just looking at their body language and nonverbal communication and trying to read between the lines and saying general truisms that apply to pretty much anybody, and they're like, wow. You know? So we expose that kind of stuff. So I'm doing more of that in 2023. People love this. How do people get away with psychic readings where like I had a friend who went to a psychic reading where supposedly her she went with her sister, and the psychic knew the sister was coming but didn't know my friend was coming. And the psychic did a reading on my friend, and and she says he was saying all these things that were, like, incredibly accurate that she had never told anyone. Yeah. Like, how do they it, like is it just that he's saying a lot and she's only filtering the stuff that's true? Or, like, what what's going on there? There's a few things going on in any sort of psychic reading. So one is cold reading, which is where you either use things you see on a person or you state general truisms, and I'll give you an example in a second. The other thing that they do, is they will throw out a ton of stuff and then rely on what is essentially confirmation bias. So they'll say so if you look at a psychic on TV, they'll say, I'm getting somebody's name starts with a t. Is it a Tom? Is it a Tim? And someone in the corner goes, Tom, my husband, he just died recently, and then the guy focuses on her. What they won't show you with a psychic that's doing a a lot like, if you go to a live show where there's a mentalist who's telling you it's a trick, it's not a real psychic, what he's doing is he goes, t, Tom, Tim, nobody. There's also a j. Maybe it's more of a j. Oh, I see. It's it's actually it's actually an I, not a t. Okay. I didn't see the bot and then someone goes, oh, that's me. So they're shifting. They're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and a mentalist who's actually doing tricks will just do that. And and what you think during the show is, wow. I can't believe he got that. But then what you realize is, well, wait a minute. If you play the tape and you're looking for it, he said, like, 5 things before one of them caught on. He also was talking to a room full of 40 people. So your so the natural next question is what if there's only 1 person in front of you? Well, sometimes they have I mean, aside from blatant tricks, like they have an earpiece where somebody's googling people's names and feeding them that. Psychics have been caught doing that. Or there's a screen that they can see where somebody's feeding them information based on the person's name or whatever's available in Google. Aside from tricks like that, I remember one one guy who was a buddy of mine actually, I shouldn't even say a buddy of mine. A guy that knows a buddy of mine. This is I had very little contact with this guy. He goes, man, I didn't believe in psychics until this weekend, and I went to a college career not a career fair, but some sort of fair. And they had a psychic, and the psychic did a reading, and it was incredibly accurate. And I said, really? That's amazing, but it's not psychic. And he's like, I don't know, man. She got a lot of stuff right about me. And this is an Indian dude who's a graphic designer. That's all I know. Okay? So I said, well, I'll do it's cold reading what this person did to you. I'll do the same thing to you, and it's a trick. And he goes, okay. Go ahead. And I go, alright. So you're an Indian dude. You're a graphic designer. Your parents, I you know, they come from an a place where they really wanted you to be a different kind of professional. Maybe they wanted you to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, and your siblings and your your cousins and your family, they all have strived towards those professions. And maybe your parents don't voice it as much as they feel it, but they're a little bit disappointed slash confused at the direction you went. Because graphic design, it's not really something they were familiar with in the old country. They really feel like maybe you're not setting yourself up for success in the future, and you also harbor a little bit of guilt. Like, maybe you disappointed your parents because you went into this, but you knew in your heart of hearts that this was going to be better for you because of medicine and and law and engineering weren't a fit for you. And he was his mind was f**king blown, dude. But here's the thing. Every Indian kid has a sister or a cousin who went to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, and it's so it's a famous cliche that Indian parents want their kids to become doctors, lawyers, or engineers, and in preferably in that order. And that if you do anything other than that, especially something that's artistic, your parents are gonna be like, what are you doing? You're never gonna make as much money as your brother, your sister, your cousin, whatever. And it's always gonna be a point where people are gonna say, why'd you let your kid do that? And then the kid's gonna feel guilty. Every Indian guy that I know has that exact same issue, every single one. And somehow none of them know that every other Indian guy that they know also has that same issue. This guy thought I was a freaking psychic. I just pulled that crap out of my a*s knowing that general s**t s**t about every Indian person in America anywhere. So essentially, to do a cold read is essentially not only to pick up on stuff, but statistics. Because you know that on average, this, this, and this Yeah. Then this must be his parents' reaction. I mean I mean, stand up comedians actually do the exact same thing. They do the same thing. Crowd work with the audience. Like, I could imagine, you know, somebody who had an Indian accent, who was Indian, and and the comedian says, oh, what do you do? Oh, I'm a graphic designer. The comedian will certainly will instantly say, boy, you were a disappointment to your mom, weren't you? And, you know, the guy will start laughing instead of being amazed, but he'll say, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, one trick I always used to do, was you could always tell how long a couple's been together in a comedy club. Basically, for every inch they are sitting apart, that's how many years they've been together. A 100%. Yeah. And and it's all it almost I would say it worked like 90% of the time. Didn't work a 100% of the time, but I could tell who was on the first date. I could tell who's been together, like, let's say, 6 to 10 years, who's been together, like, 20 years. And, you know, even, like, older people who are sitting 1 inch from each other, they've only been together, like, 1 year. Mhmm. So people would be amazed when you it was harder to guess. But it always worked for some reason. I don't know why that is. And if they've been together, like, a really long time, they were sitting across from each other rather than sitting next to each other. So Yeah. It that comedy and Coldplay had a ton in common then. Right? And and, also, you know, there's other sort of psychic tricks to cold reading. I've I've done an episode about this as well from a guy who used to be a phone psychic, and he talked about how it's all just a trick. And, you know, back in the day well, of course, it's a trick. But back in the day, they used to have caller ID before anybody else had caller ID, and they'd find your area code. And this is when everybody had landlines, so they go, oh, 313. And, you know, they wouldn't say, oh, 313 area code, but they would think it, and they would see 313. It would say, okay. This is Detroit, and and then the guy would go, you are you are either in your life or geographically or both. You're on the you're on the edge. You're on the border of something. Wait a minute. You're actually you're near water, and someone's like, I'm in Detroit. I'm in the Detroit River, and next to me is Canada. And the psychic's like, oh, that's the border I see. But, also, in your life, you're on the edge of something. Of course you are. You're calling a freaking freaking psychic hotline. Why else are you calling? Right. You have a decision or you're on the edge of something. Naturally, this is why. And so this kind of cold reading is very, very common. You might pick up on something somebody's wearing. You might pick up on something that somebody, has I mean, look. Somebody might walk in wearing a, an adult might walk in, and they've got a little polo that says, you know, the Saratoga Knights, and you're like, oh, that's a local high school team. That's a parent. They don't even notice they're wearing this stuff. It's not their they didn't go to high school there unless the shirt looks like it's 20 years old. Right? It's probably not a nephew, or a niece, but you don't know that. So you're the psychic and you go, there's young people in your life that are very important to you. How would you know that? Well, you're wearing a freaking mascot of a high school team that you've had for 3 years, so you don't even notice you're wearing that. You don't even put that together. Right? But the person looks like they are a genius and they're a psychic because they're they're picking up on this. Meanwhile, you could you might as well have told them that you have kids in high school that just graduated. You know, it's interesting. We're we're going back and forth with all these stories of, like, interesting people we've interacted with either recently or relatively recently. Sure. And almost all of them are engaging in some kind of fraudulent or criminal activity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is it and and and just like true crime is the the highest ranked podcast category for the past couple years, and like you say by far, I wonder if it's basically, you know, obviously, people like kind of controversy and darkness more than they like going to church or whatever. So so it's just an interesting thing that that interesting experiences usually implies something bad. Yeah. That's true. I mean, I think part of it is we love to be at the edge of a world or get a glimpse into a world that we don't necessarily wanna step into. Right? Because if you look at stuff that's popular on YouTube, not all of it, of course, but if you look at a lot of the stuff that's popular on YouTube, a lot of it will be, yeah, like you said, true crime, or it'll be a a a story of somebody that did did some amazing thing or some terrible thing. Mafia stories are incredibly popular. Right? Even now, when the secret's out, you know, those guys weren't necessarily good, and they're very, unhappy with their lives and all this stuff. My Sammy the Bull Gravano interview was really popular, and people are like, this guy is so interesting. He's a great storyteller. But I I almost feel like they missed the end of the interview because one of the things that he says at the end is I said, what would you what what would you say to all these people who worship and love the mafia guys? And he's like, yeah. You know? He said one thing, and I said, but, really, what would you say if somebody says, hey. I wanna join the mafia. This is a great way to live. And he goes, no. It sucks. You kill your friends. You kill your friend family. You kill everybody you love. You make a bunch of money. You can't tell anybody what you do. You have to hide. Somebody's kinda gonna come for you, whether it's the feds or somebody you love is just gonna shoot you in the back of the head on a holiday, and then you go to prison. And you come out, and you're broke. And he's like, sure. You wanna join the mob? Go ahead. Ruin your life. I mean, he was really fired up about this, and it was like, there was no I was I just thought it was such an interesting takeaway. And, of course, all the comments on YouTube were like, oh, the mafia is so awesome. I'm thinking, man, the last 5 minutes, did you make it that far? He he literally said do pretty much anything else in your life aside from join the mafia. But what you know, what are you thinking? What are you doing? That that's that's funny. Well, look, Jordan, I know, you you you have a busy schedule today. I don't wanna, but it's it's always fascinating to talk to you. We had no plan for this podcast at all. I don't think we had a plan. No. None. We always have great episodes, and I really enjoy talking to you. And and we should definitely catch up off podcast at some point. But, I would love to know a lot of my episodes the past few weeks have been about recommending things for 2023. I do recommend anyone who hasn't yet tried it. Listen to many episodes of the Jordan Harbinger Show. And, Jordan, thanks once again for for coming on the podcast and talking about the darkness in all of us. Thank you. Yeah. I would love to stay longer, but I actually have to pick up my parents from the airport. So I done it it wasn't one of those I only have this much time for you. It was low. Literally, my mom is probably waiting on a platform at the airport. By the way, episode 282 is, of the Jordan Harbinger show is the one with Ken Perenny, the art forger, 282. And the fake psychic was 413, just so people aren't like, how do you spell Perenny? Because it is weird spelling. And and I'd love to hear what people think because you you're right. There is some sort of obsession with this person committed a crime, and they did a bad thing. We're gonna hear about it, and then they're gonna ask for it. Crime. He didn't just, like, you know, I don't know what a what a non weird he didn't just, like, mug some. Right. He's not a yeah. He doesn't beat Forged art. Yeah. Perfect art for the mafia. Forged that. To Amsterdam. Fake psychics. Yeah. The Jewel Thief episode was really good. Larry Lawton, he talked about how he plan how he plans to attack a jewelry store, and he's there man, these guy because the here's the thing about these criminals, man. They're some of them are so good at what they do that you think, man, if you'd applied this to something else, you would have been really, really good at that too. So the jewelry store thing, one of the things that was really amazing is he said, I always I always do the same time. And he he would go there weeks in advance, get a hotel room, stake the place out, whatever, look at how the employees go, where they hide the money, all this stuff. And then he'd say, but then I go at I think it was, like, 4 PM because the sun shines in such a way and during a certain season only, it shines in such a way that old security cameras would always have glare on them, and it would be, like, impossible to look at the tapes. Wow. And he timed That is an interesting detail. Yeah. And I was like, wow. He really knew that from looking at security tapes because I believe he would steal the tapes, originally to, like, get rid of the tapes. And then he was like, wait a minute. I don't even need to steal the tapes because during this hour, you can't even use them. It's useless. So he's like, I don't have to break open the other thing and then get the tapes. I just have to leave, and they won't even know I they've they've no idea how this happened or that it was here. Crazy. That's fascinating. Super interesting. Detail. Yeah. And just like the just like the, Ken Peroni with the with the varnish. Mhmm. Like, how he Right. Able to replicate that. Like like, you have to be hardcore to be good at criminal activity. I think at some point for these guys, it's the craft. It's they're just so good at it that they're in the flow state, and they really love it, and it just happens to be a crime. And it starts off as it's lucrative, but it ends up being almost like it's it's art sometimes literally for them. And in the case of the jewel thief, he really just enjoyed it. He'd never his thing was I've never had had to be violent. I never had to follow through on a threat. I never had to do anything but scare people, and he's like, and even then, I took it easy. Now he may be rewriting history. Who knows? We'd have to talk to the victims to find out. But I think at some point, these guys just really enjoy what they do, and it happens to be a crime, not really the other way around, if that makes sense. That that so interesting. Well, to hear more of these stories, check out Jordan at the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan Thank you. Pick up your parents. Yes. Family first. Family first. And let's talk soon. Thank you, brother. Talk to you soon. Take care.
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