The Art of a Great Question with Cal Fussman [From the Archive]

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This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

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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 (1:01)

Do you think this ability to super connect with people and indulge in the unknown, we're losing this a little bit. Your premise is that questions and questioning, opening up someone's life almost as if you're cracking the shell of a peanut. This is a skill that's no longer around as much.

Cal Fussman (1:19)

When you think about it, there was no Google back then. Now, just about any question you have, you could put it into Google or Quora and you're going to get an answer. So if you're looking at the laws of supply and demand, the supply of answers is filled. We got answers up the kazoo.

But how many great questions do we have? How many people who ask great questions do we have?

There's much more demand for that.

James Altucher (1:53)

I want to get to the idea that questioning not only is a way of connection, but it's like this superpower. Questioning and figuring out how to dig in and open people up, provides you experiences and surprises and expands your horizons. That is the superpower.

I am so excited to have Cal Fussman, writer at large at Esquire on the podcast and Cal, I first heard him on Tim Ferriss' podcast a couple times and I read about you in Tools of Titans and I've been reading your stuff ever since, listening to your podcast. You've written some New York Times bestselling books. You have your column in Esquire is What I've Learned. How many people have you interviewed overall?

Cal Fussman (2:43)

I never calculated that but for people about I guess you'd say iconic stature probably four to five hundred.

James Altucher (2:53)

I'm gonna have to ask you what iconic stature means like I feel like you're dissing some people there.

Cal Fussman (2:58)

Well no people who everybody knows.

James Altucher (3:01)

Like okay so you've interviewed Gorbachev, Kobe Bryant, of course Muhammad Ali was a classic story that you wrote, the one page story for Esquire that you wrote. Al Pacino, Serena Williams, Larry King. Larry King you have breakfast with every day when you're in LA. You also have a great podcast, Changing Your Questions Changes Your Life or no Big Questions but you say Changing Your Questions Changes Your Life.

But reading your story before I get into all the people you've interviewed and had an interview and amazing things you've learned and experienced. I remember reading you were in Brazil, traveling around the world when you were younger and you met your wife who's still your wife, I don't know how many years later, decades later. You met your wife while you were both standing in the aisle of a bus.

Cal Fussman (3:50)

So here's what happened. So I was traveling around the world for roughly 10 years.

James Altucher (3:58)

Why?

Cal Fussman (4:00)

Okay, we'll take it back further. So what happened is I came to New York to be a magazine writer in about 1980

And there was this startup magazine called Inside Sports, no longer exists that this came out to compete with Sports Illustrated when Sports Illustrated was in its heyday. And the guy who was in charge of this, his name was John Walsh, later went to ESPN and he was the guy who created Sports Center. So he brought in an amazing group of people to get in on this magazine. And I was 22 and I basically left my job in St. Louis, packed what little I had in a little Honda, drove to New York.

James Altucher (4:59)

What was your job in St. Louis?

Cal Fussman (5:01)

I was working at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, covering the, being the second guy on the Cardinals baseball team. I was very young. And so the plan there was for me to understand all the sports in the city and then eventually become the columnist. But I kind of understood very quickly that if I did, if I did that, if I stayed in St. Louis even a few more years, basically, my life was fixed.