The James Altucher Show

A Note from James:

Imagine going on Shark Tank in front of Mark Cuban, Mr. Wonderful, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, and the rest of the Sharks. You’re offering 10% of your business for $700,000, which values the company at $7 million. They all say no. Then, a few years later, Amazon buys your company for a billion dollars.

That's gotta feel really good, and that's the experience of our next guest, Jamie Siminoff.

Jamie built...

Episode Description:

James talks with psychotherapist and bestselling author Amy Morin about practical mental strength—the kind you need in the moment, not just in theory. Amy’s earlier books focused on what mentally strong people don’t do. Her new book, The Mental Strength Playbook, turns that work into 50 fast, usable tools for anxiety, stress, worry, conflict, focus, and resilience.

The conversation is personal and tactic...

A Note from James:

People are so afraid of AI, and I get it. They’re afraid of how it will affect jobs. They’re afraid of bias, manipulation, or even worst-case scenarios like AI turning on humans.

That’s why I love talking to Peter Diamandis.

He wrote Abundance, came on the podcast 10 years ago, and now he’s back with his new book, We Are as Gods. He also runs the Moonshots podcast and the Meta Trends newsletter, both worth ...

Episode Description:

In this From the Archive episode, James talks with Cal Newport about a simple but uncomfortable idea: most people are working hard on the wrong things.

Newport breaks down the difference between deep work—focused, cognitively demanding effort that produces rare and valuable output—and shallow work, which fills time but doesn’t move the needle. In a world engineered to fragment attention, the ability to f...

Notes from James:

I wish I had been Kolin Jones when I was 18 years old.

When Colin was 19, during COVID, he set up his own private jet brokerage out of a college dorm room. No investors. No jets. No connections. Just a GoDaddy website, an email address, and an obsessive willingness to send 2,500 cold emails a day.

Amalfi Jets is on track to do $120 million in revenue this year. And he still doesn't own a single plane.

I love ...

Episode Description

In this From the Archive conversation, James talks with Yuval Noah Harari about the idea underneath Sapiens and Homo Deus: humans did not come to dominate the planet because they were the strongest animals, but because they learned to cooperate at scale through shared stories—religion, money, nations, and eventually data. The discussion moves from early human history to agriculture, war, terrorism, AI, a...

A Note from James:

What is going on in Iran? And once this war is over, what happens to investing? Is the world coming down? I’m bringing on the Invest Diva, Kiana Danial, to talk about both. She wrote Triple Compounding For Dummies, and we’ll get into that, too.

She’s Iranian, and she has a perspective on what’s happening that I think matters. My gut, based on the force of history, is that when this war is over, the Islamic...

A Note from James

One of my favorite people in the world is back on the podcast: Jen Shahade. She’s been on the show before. She’s a great chess player, a great poker player, a two-time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion, and the author of the new book Thinking Sideways, about how lessons from chess can help with decision-making.

As a chess player myself, I can say these techniques really do work. And she even talks about me in the...

A Note from James:

This is why I love doing podcasts—talking to people like Dr. Sheena Howard, author of Why Wakanda Matters. Wakanda is the country where Black Panther is from, and Sheena has written extensively about comics, including work on Black Panther itself.

We talk about comics, race, and storytelling. I asked a question I was almost afraid to ask—whether the Black Panther movie was racist against other Black people...

Episode Description

This archival conversation with Jim Kwik moves beyond memory tricks and into something more fundamental: how we think, learn, and make decisions.

Jim breaks down why most people forget nearly everything they read, why repeating the same mistakes isn’t always about logic, and how modern life is quietly degrading attention and memory. He explains how the brain filters information, how habits form, and why f...

A Note from James:

I talked to Nelson Dellis, who’s a six-time USA Memory Champion and has broken multiple Guinness World Records. His book, Everyday Genius, makes a pretty bold claim—that with some practice and the right techniques, you can dramatically improve how your brain works.

We didn’t just talk about memory. We got into everything: mental math, focus, cold reading, even some techniques that feel almost like magic. A...

A Note from James:

I’ve been in therapy for more than three decades.

Different therapists. Different kinds of therapy. Different crises.

And one question has always fascinated me: What is the therapist actually thinking while I’m sitting there talking?

Are they bored? Are they judging me? Are they secretly Googling me?

My guest today, Lori Gottlieb, knows the answer—because she’s both sides of the story.

She’s a psychotherapist,...

A Note from James:

In the Blondie song “Rapture,” which was the number-one song in 1981, Debbie Harry has this famous line: “Fab Five Freddy told me everybody’s fly.”

So the question is—who is Fab Five Freddy?

This guy is one of the central figures in the birth of hip-hop culture. Not just rap music, but the whole ecosystem: graffiti, breakdancing, fashion, DJ culture, art, film—everything that eventually turned into a massiv...

A Note from James:

Tony Hawk is one of the greatest athletes of all time—but what fascinates me most isn’t just the tricks.

It’s the mindset.

Tony didn’t just become the best skateboarder in the world. He built an entire ecosystem around what he loved: competitions, companies, tours, sponsorships, and one of the most successful video game franchises ever created.

What’s interesting is that none of it was planned that way. It c...

A Note from James:

In the last episode, we talked about whether Martin Shkreli really deserves the label “most hated man in America.” My conclusion was no, and I hope you came to the same conclusion after hearing his perspective.

In this episode, we shift gears completely. We talk about Bitcoin, crypto, AI, energy, optical computing, and what the future of technology might actually look like.

Martin has a very unusual combina...

A Note from James:

Is he the most hated man in America? I don’t think so.

Martin Shkreli was notorious for various reasons that you’ll hear about in this episode—there are some crazy stories—but I’ve come to know Martin over the past few months as both a friend and business partner.

Let’s just hear his stories and explanations. I think you’ll agree with me that this is one of the smartest people I’ve ever had on the podcast.

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A Note from James:

In the first two episodes with Dr. Nicole McNichols, we talked about chemistry, communication, anatomy, and the science of pleasure. This final episode is really about something deeper—how relationships evolve over time and what actually keeps desire alive.

Because the truth is, long-term relationships don’t stay exciting automatically. They require intention. They require curiosity. And sometimes the issu...

A Note from James:

In the first episode with Dr. Nicole McNichols, we talked about chemistry, myths, and why communication matters more than performance. This episode goes deeper—into biology, anatomy, dopamine, desire, and the mechanics of pleasure.

There are a lot of myths around sex. Some are cultural. Some are Hollywood. Some come from bad science. And some just come from silence.

This conversation gets specific. We talk ...

Episode Description:

This archival conversation with Ramit Sethi is a masterclass in systems thinking, behavioral psychology, and building a “rich life” on your own terms.

Long before online courses were mainstream, Ramit was quietly building scalable systems—automating money, testing business ideas rigorously, and rejecting conventional wisdom around careers, housing, and passion. In this conversation, he explains why most ...