Perfect Is Boring: Tyra Banks and Carolyn London [From the Archive]

**Carolyn London** (0:00)
Best thing that's ever happened to you financially, go.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Easy, sold my car on Carvana, amazing offer. Really?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:06)
I hit 200 on a scratcher.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?

**James Altucher** (0:10)
No.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
How many scratchers did you hit to get that?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:13)
I hit a button on carvana.com once.

**James Altucher** (0:15)
Okay, that's fair.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:22)
Exactly, inexplicably good.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Offer's worth bragging about.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:27)
Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up Visma and apply.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:43)
Presenting The Archive, classic episodes that remain timeless. The raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up.

**James Altucher** (1:06)
Super excited to have.
Tyra Banks and her mom, Carolyn London, who just wrote this excellent book called Perfect Is Boring.
By, you say Tyra and her mama.

**Tyra Banks** (1:18)
Yeah.

**James Altucher** (1:18)
So, you know, I have never seen a book.
I have to back off for just a second. This is going to sound strange. I've watched probably half the seasons of America's Next Top Model.

**Tyra Banks** (1:31)
And it's amazing.

**James Altucher** (1:32)
And the reason why it sounds strange is I'm a 50-year-old man and I watch this. But it's my daughters loved the show. They loved everything about it. So I would watch it. It was bonding time for me. And often we would pause, you know, some girl would do something and, you know, it's part of the different exercises you had put them through. And we would pause and try to figure out what you were going to say and what the other girl was going to say. Because they wanted to understand, you know, kind of, it became very clear to them, and you point this out so much in the book in such an interesting way, but it became very clear to them that it's not just about looks, it's about personality, it's about presence and charisma and how you use what you have. And I think that's very significant for your career.
You often faced times when, oh no, no, no, you need to lose weight or oh no, no, no, there's never been African American Victoria's Secret Angel. You know, there's obviously two ways to deal with that, which is to either give up or to figure out your way through.
And I think your influence, Carolyn, helped her find the values to keep on pushing through and even not just persisting but making Tyra stronger as a result so to become a success she's become. First, how do you decide to write this book together?

**Tyra Banks** (2:49)
You know, we had been thinking about writing this book for 10 years.

**James Altucher** (2:52)
10 years.

**Tyra Banks** (2:52)
In fact, we had a book deal, like a massive book deal, like a lot of zeros, a book deal to write this 10 years ago.

**James Altucher** (3:00)
Note to self, find way to get a book deal with massive zeros on it.

**Tyra Banks** (3:05)
And we ended up passing because I was so busy and book tour and all that. I just was like, I couldn't do it. I was doing Top Model and my talk show at the same time. I used to do two Top Models a year. It was just way too much. So we were like, let's pause.
Cut to 10 years later and here we are. And we decided to write this book because we have this really unique relationship. And so many people were like, I want to be like you and your mama with my dad and my daughter or my son and my mom. Whatever it is, these relationships, they want this relationship like we have. And I think our relationship stems from the raw and honest conversations that my mom had with me and how open and honest she is, so much that she makes me blush with her honesty.

**James Altucher** (3:48)
She must have made you blush your whole life.

**Tyra Banks** (3:50)
All the time.

**James Altucher** (3:51)
She threw a period party for you on her first period. The Frank Sex Talks, the discussions about modeling. Obviously, it's a very troubling industry in a lot of ways for the young woman, which you discuss quite a bit in the book. And then your subsequent success after that, which I want to talk about a little bit. But, so yeah, so then you started writing. Was there ever any con, like it seemed like what would happen is you would write a section and it was almost like a letter to your mom and then she would write the next, it was almost like a conversation.