Episode 74 – Tucker Max – Book in a Box

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up guys welcome to another episode of the human experience this is your host Xavier katana in this episode we featured mr. Tucker max a truly interesting figure we really just dough through what it means to be an entrepreneur we talk about mentorship and how to go about finding a mentor hugely interesting episode make sure that you grab a copy of Tucker’s book in a box method find us on Facebook Twitter YouTube all at the human XP server costs

bandwidth all that is killing us guys so make sure that you help us get you the best content out there the human xpcom / donate coffee lunch dinner all work here is without much further ado mr. Tucker max thank you guys so much for listening the human experience is diving into the book in a box method with our guest tucker max Tucker welcome to HX p Thank You Man thanks Rodney so Tucker I mean you you I’m just gonna dive in here man

you are such a polarized figure and then there’s people who either like you or just don’t like you putting it lightly I mean how do you how do you deal with criticism and you know based on your your early successes and who you are now how do you deal with that that criticism that you get from people it’s not something I worry about you know I mean I i doubt i don’t know any other way to put it it’s it’s kind of funny you ask this because I’m I’m actually giving a

speech about this and like a huge conference in a month about how to have the freedom to say what whatever you want right whatever you feel and and I’m actually having the it’s one of those things but you know we’re like some if you’re really good at something and you you’re so good you’ve never kind of really had to practice or focus on it you actually have to get help to deconstruct how you do it versus if you’re bad at something and you have to

teach yourself how to do it then you really kind of know exactly how you learned this is one of those things that I’m really good at and I’m not exactly sure why or what I’m doing differently than other people it’s a super normal question I get this all the time how do you deal with this and I’m always confused that like my response is always I don’t understand what there is to deal with you know like at least up all I’ve been able to kind of construct and pull

apart so far is that um the thing that I do really well that I think a lot of shape this is what it is I think a lot of people mess up is a lot of people I only care about what specific people who are close to me and meaningful to me sink right like a lot of people think oh you just don’t care what anyone thinks that’s nonsense that you be a human a fully functioning emotionally connected human and not care what anyone thinks the only way to not

care what anyone at all thinks is to either be a robot or so see about I care what people think the only I think the main difference between me and most people is that I only focus on the people that I actually care about and I don’t have like a vague notion in my head of like Oh what do people in cold think you know like you’re never gonna hear me say well what will people say what do you mean what people who what are they gonna say about what you know

my step mother used to always say that what are people gonna say and I’ll always look at her and say who and she’d say well people what people tell me exactly who you’re talking about and then I can tell you what they’re gonna say and whether I will care or not based on the person yeah you know I mean I mean there must be a sense of freedom for you since it doesn’t really bother you that people are criticizing you or hating on you or whatever it may be I

mean that that must be incredibly freeing sort of so yes no yes it’s very freeing that I don’t have a vague notion my head of people and I and I like I’m not controlled by like some general notion but at the same time I’m not you know if if my wife doesn’t like something i do or whatever that impacts me deeply you know so it’s not i go through the same range of emotions and have the same cares and fears that everyone does i think the key is that I

just restrict the input to only the people that actually matter to me in my life you know at what point did you shift from these books that you’re writing about your book mate was what seemed like a really interesting read on how to instruct people on finding relationships that serve them in win-win situations right so how have you evolved from I hope they serve beer in hell to book in a box well the first thing actually I want to say is that I’ve

always been about relationships that serves both people like even when I was just drinking and hooking up it’s not like I was going after girls who were looking for husbands she felt I mean that would be a huge awful waste of time why would I do that the only real difference between who I was in my 20s and mate is that I focused a lot more I focus a lot of that book on sort of how do the fundamentals of how any guy can sort of build the attributes they need

to get the relationship they want right that’s kind of the real difference for me personally the transition I went through was it was mostly about I think my might be a little bit different than most people like I didn’t need help meeting women I didn’t need help with any stuff like that I needed help I needed help connecting to myself and I needed help growing in the ways that I wanted to grow but I didn’t know how to grow if that makes sense so for me

there’s a lot of ways to kind of to grow and a lot of them work for you know differently for different people the the kind of package of things that worked really well for me were a combination of psychoanalysis and then meditation the combination of those two things which are kind of diametrically opposite ways of approaching the exact same problem really helped me kind of connect to myself and face a lot of issues that I hadn’t been facing that we’re kind of

driving some underlying behaviors that I just didn’t want anymore that’s kind of the high level and I happy to dive into details if you want yeah we can we can go further into the interview and then we can see where it leads I actually want to get into there was something there was something that you said in an interview that i was listening to for the research for the show regarding success that i found incredibly impactful and powerful you said you said

that early in your early stages when you were when you were moving from your first book to Hollywood and creating this this Hollywood career did you make a mistake there that’s what I got from what you were saying was that you should have if i’m quoting you correctly should have built the foundations of what you were where you were successful instead of jumping into something where it was completely new for you yeah yeah I made so many mistakes in in my first

sort of if you call like the sort of frat tire that you know the drinking hook up stories that that was my first career ah so many mistakes I made almost every mistake you can make um like III don’t know how much I made in that ten-year career let’s just call it whatever five or six million I should have made ten times that that’s how many mistakes I made and and not that money is the only thing that matters i’m just using money as a proxy for sort of the

not just the value create but the value you capture i created way less than i captured by less than I should have and the reason is because one of the big reasons is as soon as I had any success with writing my immediate sort of instinct was oh let’s go do TV and movies right it’s sort of like um I max I I see this all the time now and I understand the motivation but you’ll see someone succeed with something and like oh yeah that like that’s that’s what I

want to do so I can go do something else I’m passionate about or I’m good at and I’m just like what are you doing but I made the same mistake man like I wrote in a really good book that really captured a certain voice and a certain sort of perspective at a certain moment in time and sort of all art is pretty much all art is um uh it’s it’s time contextual you know I mean there’s something Michelangelo’s David you know whatever which are sort of timeless but

that’s very rare to have timeless art the vast majority is is contextual and and I hit something I hit it right but instead of writing all of my books right when I was sort of in when I was personally living those stories and the time was right society is culturally I kind of tried to move away from that immediately to something else something bigger you know and what I what I didn’t understand is that the bigger things are always almost always going to be there

what’s not going to be there is is sort of the you only have a certain time to capture certain things in your life you know you can only be 16 when you’re 16 you’d only be 26 when you’re 26 you know that leads I mean leads me back to that that initial question of you know where where are you now so how have you gained from those those failures like what have you what have you really truly learned from I mean what how would you do it

differently now versus back then if you could go back and tell yourself you know okay look this is this is how i should have transitioned what would you have done differently I mean a lot of it’s hard for me to answer that question because even I could lay out exactly what I should have done the problem is when i was at age I never would have done it no like I since I’m 40 now 40 year old Tucker could literally get into a time capsule and go back and tell 29

year old 30 year old Tucker that he needs to do XY and Z and 29 year old talk over a argued with him cuz he was an idiot I really would have and so uh I mean the big thing I would have done is as soon as i finish i hope they serve beer in hell I would have written all the sequels that I knew were there and I had in my head and it took me like four years to actually get to them and by then I was such a different person the book was technically better my

second and third books are technically much better than my first but they don’t have that that energy and that joy to be that my first one had its kind of missing that that energy because I just wasn’t in that headspace anymore and so I like I had great art idol I had a certain amount of great art in me and I got a lot less out of me than I could have because I was so focused on I was so focused on the prizes and the rewards that I didn’t hit the target you know

there’s the old Zen koan if you want the reward focus on the target and you’ll hit it and get the reward but if you focus on the reward you’ll miss the target and get nothing you know it seems like you’ve almost become this sort of marketing genius i mean like you you nailed to you’ve had to at least two bestsellers right three number one there yes sir I don’t be silly short there um but okay so three number one bestsellers in regards to the media space and

working with with people and and your the content that you create what are you doing differently that you think people are drawn to so I I think what I do it’s sort of what I’m giving what I talk about the very beginning what I’m giving my speech on if I have one real skill that a lot of other people don’t have it’s that I’m truly willing I’m willing to be honest in a way that most people aren’t and I don’t want to say truthful

because then it sounds like I have some monopoly on truth which obviously i don’t but everyone can have them and I mean no one knows what do we what do we r any of us really know about objective in quotes truth nothing but all of us know what we think and feel and I have always been willing to say that I have always been willing to come out and say in face the hard truths whether about myself or other people or whatever and that’s why my writing did so well if you

go read I hope they serve beer and how my first book no one is going to hold that book up as some technical master piece of writing but it sold two million copies today just that one single book because it’s so honest and it’s so raw and it’s so authentic when you read it you feel if in any way shape or form it relates to any experiences you’ve had you connect with it deeply you know and obviously not everyone does because not

everyone acts like a drunken fool in their 20s and throws up on themselves whatever but a lot of people do and those people really connect it with that and so that’s really what art is man all art is about it’s about helping people connect to themselves and the only way to do that is to reflect who they really are back on themselves and that’s what I did for a certain group of people yeah yeah I really connect with that I mean I

really just want to move forward with this and kind of dig into this look where you’re now you know you’ve done the best sellers and now you’re you’re kind of teaching people how to write their own book yeah more than more than teaching and then also helping them do it too our company is more of a service company than an information company but it’s a little bit of both yes so so my company’s help book in a box basically it’s kind of funny man the

company was born out of my own arrogance except the differences ten years ago I would have been too arrogant to even see my arrogance I think maybe that’s that’s the real change in me is that now at least I’m I’m aware enough to see my own hubris and arrogance and how it’s holding me back it’s not gone I’m just seeing it a little bit more so what happened was I was at an entrepreneur dinner and this woman melissa gonzalez came up to me and she said look I’ve had

this book in my head for a decade people would ask me to write it for a decade but I have a family and a business she’s like this ball or entrepreneur and she’s like I don’t have time I cannot sit at a keyboard for a year and and write it and navigate the publishing process so but she’s like but I need this out of me people want it I wanted out of me how can I do this how can I get this idea out of my head and into a book without

having to go through the the process and I kind of looked at her I’m like are you asking me how to write without writing and she’s like yeah I kind of am and so then of course I make fun of her right and I like you can’t write without writing its little right is literally in the word etc etc and she wolves rising me and she says Tucker are you an entrepreneur and I’m like yeah of course you know I’d like to think so she’s like

well I’m not sure because entrepreneurs I’m an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs help people solve problems you’re not helping me solve anything you’re just lecturing me about hard work that’s like okay hold on a minute because she froze up she was totally right it was a gut punch call out and she was a hundred percent right I was just being an elitist writer snob prick and so of course I became obsessed with this idea how do I get how do i get an idea out of

her head and into a book without her touching a keyboard and and it all came to me one day duh Socrates never wrote a word down jesus never wrote a word down Buddha never wrote a word down but we all read their books that you know they’re the most important books in Western culture how did they get into books scribes someone else wrote down their words well I was like well Jesus can do it why not Melissa and so I wrote down every single

step that can you know because I know how to structure a book how to everything about books I know so I wrote down every single thing I do when I go from idea to finish book and instead of telling Melissa what to do I just got on the phone with her every time I needed her for her book right and because I didn’t know anything about her subject it’s pop-up retail right and she didn’t want a ghost writer and I wasn’t in the business to be a ghostwriter I had no

business no desire to learn what she was talking about I just wanted her ideas in a book in her voice so every time I needed her i would get on the phone I would interview her until I feel like I got everything out of her head then um long long story short we ended up with this amazing book and from that as a can on my co-founder we developed a process to a structured interview process that clarifies the idea you know structures

the the content outlines it does interviews to get everything out of their head we recorded we transcribe it and we edit it into book pros Wow yeah and it’s it’s done amazing well the company is about two years old we’ve done about 300 books a couple bestsellers some some really amazing books it’s been pretty cool man we’ve really helped a lot of people get their ideas and the books and some of those books are amazing yeah I love it I think

it’s a fascinating idea you fired yourself as a CEO though what do you just feel like you you could you didn’t want to be in that position or how did that that go about quite frankly I wasn’t doing a good job so so so it’s kind of funny man it’s like all right so I reckon I was arrogant and elitist with Melissa she calls me out and and the I recognize it and then kind of I get humble and I go back to sort of you know first principles and beginner’s mind and

and I look at the book process again and this amazing idea comes out of it that works right and so you know for the first six months a year the company was doing me we’re growing so fast we’re doing it like it seemed like everything just came to us without even having to do anything because there was a huge demand for this and we really did kind of come up with a process that not only solved that problem but and met that demand but was genuinely like unique and

useful and then it’s like I kind of got back in the same problem like it’s one of those things you know sometimes you get you’re good at something at the beginning so you think well I’m just awesome you know and so I was like oh I’m amazing lunch preneur look at this company I created look how good I am at all these things well it turns out i had one in sight and that was it and i actually didn’t know how to run and scale a company not a mature company

what I was good at was working solving one problem that but scaling a business and creating a business are totally different skills and the the months 12 through 18 the company started we’re still growing but it’s like I could feel I could feel it coming apart at the seams you know and and so we basically long story short had to go find someone he was a client of ours he was doing a book with us and um he was amazed he built a hundred-million-dollar software

company he was like employee number five there and he became the CEO or president scaled it all the way up and and he done something else similar for wachovia and he’s like look you guys had this incredible company in this incredible process but you’re just all screwed up all over the place all the details and I’m like I know and why don’t you like help me and I was like kind he was kind of coaching me and it was like it was clear I couldn’t even learn fast enough

to keep up with the company so I kind of had to come to a decision point what’s more important me and my ego and my sense of self or the company and this success in its mission and I it was it was hard for me at first man because it’s hard to admit that you’re not good at something you’re not who you think you are or whatever but eventually I just I face the music and he came home I fired myself a CEO and brought him on board and now we’re you know we’re back to

growing crazy you know amounts and doing amazing because I have found someone better than me to do the job that the company needed yeah that I’m sure it must have been hugely difficult i mean it i think there’s there’s an old saying if you’re if you’re not intelligent surround yourself by intelligent people it looks like that’s what you’re doing when you look at someone who is in the entrepreneurial space and there’s and they’re starting out I mean what is what

is something that that you see that is a failure that they’re making something something common that that you that you notice with with people that they’re just failing at they could be doing better yeah so that it’s a great question it’s a subset of the problem but my problem the exact problem i just described so many entrepreneurs forget that being an entrepreneur is not about you it’s about the the problem that you’re solving for people like here’s

the thing that I think people forget about with all an economy is is a way to allocate resources right if I have money and someone else has an orange and I’m hungry then we trade and we’re both better off you know like they’ve solved my problem I solved Aires that’s all an economy is and in firms and companies and people and workers everything all of it is coordinating effort to solve problems that people have to create on you at being on but so many people who

become an entrepreneur do it because they think it’s an identity or a lifestyle oh I can sit on a beach and I can take selfies and I can look cool or or I can tell people at cocktail parties that i started i would start up or whatever I mean that stuff is perfectly fine but it’ll it’s only a meaningful if you’re doing it because you actually are solving real problems that real people have that they’re willing to pay for if you’re not doing that you I don’t even

mean this is a moral statement you’re not gonna have a company you know there’s nothing for you to sell there’s nowhere for it to go you’ve got to at your core realize the only point of business is either solving someone’s problem or giving them something they want but they don’t have which are not the exact same thing solving a problem is like like booking a box is solving a problem for people like they want they want to turn their ideas

into a book but but it’s too hard the normal method that’s solving a very clear problem the iPhone the iPhone did now actually solve a problem no one thought in 2004 that they needed an iphone but now in 2016 like who can live without an iphone right what the iphone did is it gave you a bunch of things that you wanted but didn’t have but they’re similar enough though you can think of them both as creating value if you are not creating meaningful

authentic value for people that they will pay for then you don’t have a business and you are an entrepreneur you’re just acting it seems like creating the key relationships is also quite integral to just running a business that is aiming leaning towards success is that something that that you’re talented at I mean how are you developing these key relationships like what is what is something that you’re doing differently that maybe other

people aren’t doing so you know what’s funny i would say yes no I would say creating relationships is super important for most people to succeed in life but not everyone has to be good at that I mean you know there’s plenty of autistic programmers who literally can’t talk to people but they can they can create massive value in the world you know so I don’t want to be here say our relationships or everything because there’s just evident a lot of evidence

to the contrary but at the same time I would actually even go further than you I would tell you that that’s the entire meaning of life that there is nothing in life that matters more than the relationships you have with the people you care about and I know for me personally especially now that I have a wife and kids and and that kind of stuff it’s like you don’t even at least I didn’t son people might be no actually a lot of people more mature than me I didn’t

realize before I had wife and kids what how much I was missing out on and how different like the world looks when you focus on relationships first and not yourself first but yes absolutely i think if you if you are good at relationships and you can kind of leverage that you can use that I think you are so far ahead of almost anybody else because most people don’t think about that even though it’s the most important thing in life most people

don’t think that way and they don’t look at relationships that way I think that’s fundamentally changing now I think we’re seeing a massive shift in in our economy I mean dude i think i think in 20 years at most pretty much all work is going to be automated and i think well we’ll probably end up having a basic income for people and the only people who are rich basically income will be more than enough to satisfy material needs and

rich people are going to be the only ones the the people that are rich will be the ones that create additional value who are amazing artists or entertainer or amazing relationships they’re amazing and connecting with other human beings you know what I’m saying I think that’s our economy used to be based on scarcity but I think we’re moving to a world where material resources are not going to be scarce I know it sounds crazy but

it’s actually like I think I think we’re getting super close and in that world I think you’re absolutely right i think you’ve nailed it that that the ability to connect with other people and relate to them will be one of the highest if not the highest value there is was there was is there has there been a specific relationship for you that that has changed your life outside of your immediate family and your wife and your kids and that’s a tough question um I my

first instinct right now is to tell you my CEO that I hired he’s just such an amazing dude and he’s he’s only five years older than me so he’s not like some old guy but um it’s weird we have very similar we’re so similar in so many ways but he has this skill set that I don’t at all like and I have a different skill set that he doesn’t it’s like it’s sort of like if you could combine the two of us we’d be like the like a successful businessman

CEO creator or whatever but like he’s the i would say him right now today for my whole life ah man that’s a hard question i would probably say maybe my friend i have a friend aaron Tyler who’s an amazing artist she’s got a book that’s going to come out soon that I think is going to become a massive runaway hit she probably maybe more than anyone hurt or my other friend Niels Parker in terms of it impact of my life Niels has been my kind of creative

partner for years he helped edit all my books I he wrote the screenplay with me based on my movie he’s done up he’s out in Hollywood now he’s not a bunch of screenplays and TV shows on his own those two people I think probably more than it anyone so there wasn’t there wasn’t a mentor type figure in your life where you were kind of down you never had that now it’s one of them I mean it’s kind of I don’t know if it this was just instinct on your party or you did

really did your research but it’s one of the I would say one of the both defining aspects of who I am and one of the most sort of sad for me aspects is that um I knew I didn’t have really parents growing up I I mean I wasn’t an orphan so I don’t mean to be like that but like my mother was a flighted center for pain and was always gone and my dad and mom got divorced when I was like a year or something and so I basically spent no

time around him either so in effect I kind of grew up alone and and I never really either had other mentors either I just never and it’s like kind of by the time I that leaves kind of a hole in you you know and and by the time I was at the point where I realized man I should really get a mentor or find someone whatever I was kind of too old you know and to both tooled into prot proud I think I’ve never which is the irony is man I’ve

been that guy for so many people I mean I could name ten people a few of whom were kind of famous I mean Ryan Holliday has gone on do all kinds of crazy stuff and I I mean no one’s mentored him more than me you know and a bunch of other people charlie hall and Jeff Waldman and we get on the list yeah it’s sort of like I’ve spent a lot of time giving away what I never got but I’ve never gone out to get that myself you know which might be it might be one of the

reasons why you know like I kind of fail part of the reason I got talked about like I kind of made a lot of wrong decisions in my first career I think I didn’t have anyone around me who was like being like dude like kind of an older brother mentor uncle type who’s like don’t do that that’s stupid but part of the reason I didn’t honestly is because I was too arrogant and two full of hubris I wouldn’t listen to anyone you know which was my fault my flaw it’s

not anyone elses I appreciate your your openness and honesty with that question so I want to touch on something that you mentioned though within that answer you you mentioned that you know you’ve you’ve served as the sort of mentor for all these people and how do you see how do how did you kind of place yourself in a position where you’re mentoring a person like Ryan Holliday who is making a lot of waves right now they they all

came to me it’s not like I I’m not a shingle you know mentor for hire I mean I think Ryan and Charlie hone both at home is HOH in it for your listeners both of those two have written pretty good pieces on how to find mentors and how to approach them and the basic gist is very simple pic people who seem to be at a place where you want to get who have skills that you want to develop and who seem to be you know kind of giving and good people and then go work for

them whatever capacity you can whether it’s paid or unpaid and if it’s unpaid just keep doing amazing stuff for them until they have to hire you which is what happened with Charlie in line both like they just were so amazing kept doing amazing stuff over and over it’s like all right like these guys are are great um that’s basically what they did you have to turn into a conscious process if you just hope someone comes along it’s

like it’s not going to happen you got to go find that person and the key is don’t if you go after really famous people like if you go after like like I’m friends with him if you got for Tim Ferriss good luck everyone tries to get Tim to mentor him you know and it’s a huge waste of time because Tim’s not gonna mentor anyone that’s not who he is he’s never mentored anyone it’s just not his style you know but there are some people who love mentoring and some

people who don’t so find the people who do and the ones who kind of fit with you and meet a bunch of them and then the ones you really connect with make a conscious effort you know give us the step-by-step for cuz I know anyone who’s listening right now about what you just said they’re gonna want to know how you know what do i do how do I all right so to find it to find it an attractive mentor a little step by step so let’s pretend i’m looking for a mentor let’s

say like I don’t know for let’s say I’m looking for a guy like me as a mentor a writer online marketer like smart strategy like you know just kind of a hot a general overall hustler let’s so let’s say i’m 19 i’m looking for someone like me or even someone like ryan right okay fine so first what i do is i think who do I want to be right like what type of person do I want to be and so I make a list of all the people that are like

that you know so like Tucker max Ryan holiday bowl o Allah like like every name and if you can’t come up with like 20 or 30 names you’re thinking way too narrow you’re thinking about like a job as opposed to a type of person so think what type of person do I want to be and who’s already there so come up with list let’s say you come up with 20 people okay great now of those 20 people uh like learn about them do some research right

look for who has ever had a mentee before who’s ever talked about mentoring before who has in sports they call it a coaching tree you know some coaches develop coaches like John Calipari has dozens of guys all over the country coaching that have coached under him whereas like you know Mike sous-chef ski only has like two or three right some people have some guys have big coaching tree some guys don’t because some guys developed how long and some guys make it

all about them so you want to find people with with coaching trees right someone who’s shown a propensity in the past to directly mentor someone then so let’s say that narrows it down to maybe 10 of the 20 have mentees right or you think would even consider it do your research on those 10 even more looking what do they like what are they not like what are they interested in right now write what you know what could they use help with and so of those 10 if you can

find something you’re interested in and something they could use help with then either start sending them stuff they’re interested in or start start helping them in a way that they could use help and don’t ask for anything say hey listen I’ve read all your stuff I love what you’re doing I thought you might be interested in this and this or I thought you maybe could use this so I just did it right see who respond don’t say hey will you be my mentor no one’s gonna say

yes we’ll just show them why they would want to work with you in any degree shape or form absolutely right so then basically give to them without expecting back and then of those 10 if you’re lucky three of them will respond okay if you’re lucky so okay three respond then keep engaging those three keep giving to them you keep exploring hey you know I’m looking for XYZ do you know anyone who needs that right do you know anyone who

would value that like right now I mean where my company we’re looking for a ton of of really town we’re hiring and we’re looking for a ton of talented people but quite honestly we’re not looking for like hustling 21 year olds we’re looking for people with skills we got to go ahead and get them right but if some kid came to me and he’s like and he like figured out what we’re looking for or asked me and I told him and he went and connected me to like

we’re looking face of her chief marketing officer right now someone with like a real growth hacker chops not sort of creative marketing like Ryan I do more sort of analytical so if he went out and found three great candidates and connected them to us I’d be like holy this dude is a baller and i would start talking to him to understand him and see maybe if either if he wanted a job or if he wanted to work with me on some side project I had you know why

would I do that because the kid showed me that he can think independently that he can get things done that he’s self-motivated that he’s empathetic he is all these traits already right it’s better than any job interview in a job interview I’m trying to guess if someone’s going to be good this kids already shown me that he or she are good you know they’ve already shown me by doing it right so so those are kind of the steps I would do it again the

problem is you can’t just lay out specific i can add general steps but specific the specifics are going to change based on the type of person you’re going after and what you’re looking for from them yeah yeah I mean I think that’s gold man I don’t think there’s anyone really clarifying the step-by-step instructions on how to develop a relationship with someone that you admire and are looking to be mentored by so I really I really

appreciate your answer on that I kind of want to talk about your your angel investing venture and what what happened there so I spent for you after I kind of retired from flat tire I spent four years angel investing and you know I invested in about 80 companies I’m somewhere between a million two million dollars and I did pretty well like I’ve already had a couple of good exits I’m already you know sort of in the black and I expect two or three more major

exits so I did I did well not as well as like Chris soccer or something that I did very well I I ended up quitting angel investing for two main reasons i guess the week one is that there’s just so many people doing it now that there’s so many amateurs in the space it’s really driven up prices and it’s made it really hard to source deals and i feei feel like entrepreneurship is so hot and so many people want to start a company because

it’s the it thing and most of them are just terrible and they just should be working for somebody else because they don’t understand exactly what i talked about earlier what you asked me about what entrepreneurs need to know you need to know that you’re in business serving other people’s needs and creating something the value and and I would say maybe twenty-five percent of the deals I was seen were people who actually understood that was the core essence of

what they were doing like most most others think oh I’m making a cool product or I’m doing whatever no you’re not it’s not cool if it doesn’t serve anyone’s needs and that’s kind of what so does give that was getting very frustrating and then the other thing was once I started booking a box it’s like you can’t be great at two things you can be great at one thing and at a time at least you know there’s no one’s a world-class pole vaulter and a

world-class novelist it just doesn’t happen but Ted Williams was a world-class baseball player and then a world-class fisherman but not at the same time and so angel investing is one of those things if you’re not dedicated to it you’re going to lose money because it’s just impossible to be good at that casually so I decided to dedicate all my time to book in a box I admire that you’ve in the last 10-15 years I would be shocked if you didn’t go through all

these sort of phase shifts in your life you know like you’ve you’ve gone from this sort of fraternal writing this sort of jokester stuff to actually serving people and creating a company that that can you know help others people that that that don’t know where to begin maybe and and and and launch them into something that they’ve always wanted is you know is is there something that you would give to budding authors or people who

are looking to become authors there a piece of advice that you would give someone that doesn’t know where to start or is is trying to publish but just just just isn’t you know isn’t it isn’t happening for them um well I think I would have would say you need start asking questions why are you writing a book what are you hoping to get from it if you’re not able to start or finish a book you probably don’t know the answers to those questions um and and then I

would even go further why are you writing a book what audience are you trying to write for and what do you know that’s relevant to that and interesting to that audience if you can’t answer those questions I would say there’s about a hundred percent overlap with people who cannot move forward as a writer and people who cannot answer those questions hmm Wow okay you know Tucker what is what is what has it been the biggest challenge for you like what

is what is something that you deal with even now I’m at the point in my life dude where I don’t have competition anymore my only competition of myself and I mean that are bit my companies like that and personally I’m like that and um it’s weird if it’s it’s a hard having external competition is so great because it’s so clarifying you know if there’s an enemy then it’s it’s just this point point me in that in the enemy’s direction you know it’s so easy

but when the enemy is you it’s so hard it’s so hard and I feel like uh this maybe this has been true my whole life but maybe I just now have understood it fully I feel like the only enemy at this point I have in my life is me like my anger I still I’ve such an anger problem sometimes and i’ll tell you you see that super acutely when you have a kid like you can’t be yelling at your kid you see it in their face you know I’m two-year-old son

like I mean it’s not like I’m screaming and we’re hitting in there anything but even just a little bit a tight what I think is just like not even anger it impacts him a lot and so like and I don’t want that I don’t want it in any way shape or form be like that you know and so like I’m same with my wife sale everything dude I mean it’s like what you poor talk a lot earlier with relationships I feel like every impediment in my life to great

relationships for the most part is me are things I bring to the table and that’s it’s tough man it’s tough when the enemy or things inside you and you’ve got to turn you’ve got to really examine yourself and face hard truths and face painful realities um but that’s that’s the only place left for me to grow you know for better for worse you know I don’t maybe it’s because I have so many problems I don’t know I don’t know I think that is a one of the most

honest answers that we’ve gotten on the show I appreciate that man um so to Tucker what is what is your next step in what is the next thing for you do right now man my life is a family and booking a box business that’s it you know I am yourself i guess i include maybe self and family but like um next step is famiiy I have a daughter do December 15th so obviously like family family stuff is like me working through whatever issues I have that that aren’t

working in the context of the family because my my wife’s not perfect but she’s awesome and my kid is great and the kid coming I assume you know healthy so she should be fine so almost if the product family ever has problems it’s going to be because I don’t fix my stuff where I’m not dealing with my stuff and then business-wise um we have a gold mine we have an amazing gold line on our hands and it and as long as we just work the process every

single day we’re going to not just create a huge company but a company helps thousands if not hundreds of thousands if not potentially millions of people write their books and share their knowledge and wisdom and that I mean you know we might not be the ones changing the world but those books will and if we can you know if we can do that like that’s there’s nothing there’s not much bigger impact than that you know yeah well what a profound statement man love

it Tucker where can where can people find your work sir oh so Booker box com it’s my company and then you know you can find me the normal places Twitter Facebook whatever I have a site tucker max top me which is sort of like my personal writing I don’t put a lot of stuff up there anymore because I have to work you know but I mean that’s what you read the the piece about me firing myself a CEO and stuff so there’s some good stuff on there guys you have been

listening to the human experience my guest tucker max the book is called book in a box method make sure you go pick that up we will see you guys next week thank you guys so much for listening