Recently by James Altucher: How To Be the Smartest Person on the Planet
I’m very nervous. On October 11 I have to talk at Barry Ritholz’s conference, “The Big Picture”. There’s a saying in poker,”When you look around the table and you can’t find the fish, it means you’re the fish”. When I look down the list of speakers at Barry’s conference, one thing becomes clear to me:
I’m the fish.
I’ve got a couple of other things going against me. For one thing I wrote a post about “11 ways to be a great speaker”. So it’s like I took a gun and just shot myself in the head right before the talk. Expectations will be high so I need to use this post to drastically lower them.
The other problem is “theme”. I once asked Barry how he writes three or four posts a day for his blog. His blog is very popular. He shows me the stats. He get’s 5-6x the traffic I get.
“I write about whatever I’m angry about that day,” he told me.
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And Barry is always angry. The last time I saw him he was ranting about some conve
rsation he had that morning with the insurance company and he grew that into a whole rant on how bad the entire insurance industry was. I just kept nodding my head. What else is there to say?
I think the time I got together with him before that he was…ranting about the insurance industry! He had ANOTHER conversation with someone from the insurance company. Were they the same company? I have no idea!
These women in India at the call center don’t even know what they are dealing with when Barry R calls.
Barry gets angry about lots of things. The economy, stocks, the government, unemployment. So when he has a blog and a conference called “the Big Picture”, presumably these are the topics he wants people to discuss. Today in his blog he talks about mortgages interest deductions, FDIC bank failures, the growing difference between the rich and the poor, and on and on. He’ll take a great stat/chart built usually by an informed source, and then he provides his angry rant on it. That’s “The Barry Method”.
Here’s the problem: I don’t want to talk about any of these things. Particularly in a room filled with people smarter than me. The economy, stocks, the government, unemployment, the mortgage situation, insurance, bank failures, rich/poor. That’s eight things. I’m sure if I read Barry’s blog a little more I’ll find two more things I’d be terrified to talk about. I can rant also about all these things. But what if I say something stupid? Then everyone in the room will be like, “That James Altucher. He’s just being crazy. Let’s get the real speakers on. What…is he going to do that Dow 20,000 prediction again? Barry will rip him to shreds and everyone will laugh.”
So I have some ideas of other things to talk about:
