Altucher's Extended Isolation

Sam Parr shares a story about meeting James Altucher, a successful newsletter entrepreneur with unusual habits.

"I think James might be the craziest person that I've met in the last six months. He's got this crazy haircut and in real life he sort of looks like a rock star. He's created startups, made money, lost it all, and now I think he's on mountain 3.

He has a thing called Choose Yourself Financial that started as a newsletter where he would write about his interesting opinions. He sold a portion or all of it to Agora, a large newsletter business. Now he's their highest or one of their highest earning newsletters. His newsletter did $130 million in revenue last year, very profitable.

I hung out with him and his wife, and he said one thing to me in passing that made the record skip. He said, 'I love DoorDash because I don't leave my house for like three or six weeks at a time, and if I need a pen they just bring me a pen.'

I was like, 'What did you just say? You don't leave your house for three to six weeks at a time?'

He told me, 'Sometimes I just get so into something that I literally will not step foot outside for like four weeks at a time.'

He said five other things like that where he was just so fascinating. It was proof of what Peter Thiel talks about in Zero to One - extreme success means you're likely going to have extreme personality traits that come off as weird or undesirable in many settings. James very much has the brilliant but forgetful and quirky scientist vibe to him.

It was wild seeing him have normal conversations because his opinion and the way he looked at things was 100% fresh and different from how I looked at the most normal things. When he said he didn't leave his house, I was like 'That's horrible,' and he was shocked that I was criticizing him."