Last month, entrepreneur James Altucher joined Glenn to share his interesting thoughts on corporatism and success. Altucher, who is the author of Choose Yourself!: Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream, has written about a wide range of topics, and he joined Glenn on radio this morning to discuss the danger of labels and the normalcy bias in today’s society.
“I think one of the biggest problems we have in the world today… is labels,” Glenn said. “Everybody has a label… and we're now discovering that those labels are worthless… This whole house of cards is coming down because you can lie all you want, but at some point the lies catch up to you.”
“James Altucher is a guy that has been on our program I think about a month ago… We were just talking about the masks that everybody wears, and the labels that everybody wears,” he continued. “Everybody is afraid today somehow or another they're going to be caught, they're going to be found out. And I don't mean caught doing something wrong. I mean just caught being a fraud.”
On Tuesday’s radio program, Glenn read a revealing Facebook post Altucher penned in response to the killings in California on Friday. In the post, Altucher explained his own struggles to fit in. In the end, the post showed that we aren’t actually all that different. Glenn asked Altucher to explain why he wrote the post.
Read the Facebook post HERE.
“Basically, we all go through things that we're scared to reveal to other people. We think people won't like us if we show our true selves. But if you think about it, if you go the costume party, everybody is wearing a costume… Well, if you're out of the costume, then you become the unique person and you finally can see the other people who are unique,” Altucher explained. “But I think we're also afraid to take off these costumes… You mentioned about the labels. Everyone wants to say, ‘I'm a Democrat’ or ‘I'm a Republican.’… But people are afraid to say, ‘Hey, I don't know’ or ‘I'm scared.’ In general, people live out of fear instead of being open to the world.”
Glenn has been talking about the innate power of the individual to change the world quite often lately, and Altucher agreed that any real change in society must come from the individual.
“The first change has to happen with me. I have to change myself… then what I see is the people around me change. Let's say you're angry and you yell at your kids. Then suddenly they’re going to be angry people. But if you love your kids, then they're going to be more loving people,” he said. “So that's what you do for the people around you. You change, and it ripples out like a rock being thrown in the center of the ocean. All the ripples ultimately reach to the shore. If we all dedicate ourselves to looking inside and being happy with what we see and authentic with what we see, that's the change that gets created in the world.”
Editor’s Note:Altucher will also be joining Glenn on Wednesday’s Glenn Beck Program at 5pm ET. Not a subscriber? Start your 14-day free trial HERE.