An Unfiltered Conversation with Tucker Max
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Number one rule to writing, for myself at least, what's the truth? How can I actually get real truth? Colors, shapes, feelings in the body. Yeah. I've never met a person that didn't have an interesting story. Most creators turn their suffering into art. I want to write a funny story. What do I need to be thinking?

Great humor is speaking the truth that everyone sees and feels, but no one's willing to say. Oh, wow. There isn't a formula for selling books beyond humor.

Today's guest is Tucker Max, and you probably know him as the guy who wrote books like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, books about parties and drinking and sex going back 15 to 20 years. And he's written now a bunch of memoirs. Collectively, they've sold, I don't know, something like 5 million copies. And then he's also ghostwritten a bunch of memoirs for celebrities. And I asked him, I said, Tucker, what is the key to writing a good memoir? And he said, telling the truth.

And of course you hear that. You're like, okay, that's obvious, David. But really, how do you tell the truth? How do you not skirt your emotions? How do you face your fears, face your feelings? And how do you get that sincere, unencumbered truth onto the page? Because that's what makes for a good memoir. That is the essence of what makes for good stories. So if you're someone, you want to write your story, you want to publish a memoir someday, you're looking for guidance. Well, we made this conversation for you.

Writing for me was the way to feel emotions in a safe, controllable way at the beginning, right? Which is why I wrote humor because that's what jokes are. Jokes are a way, they're a way to tell the truth and they're a way to say what you're feeling, but distance yourself from it, right? Yeah. Like if you actually, so many people had so many opinions about my books that didn't read them, right? But the people who read them, why?

why they love them so much is, yeah, there's like a lot of arrogance and a lot of nonsense and a lot of, you know, 20-year-old male puffery and buffoonery. But there's also a lot of vulnerability. There's a lot of places where I'm like, I recognize that I'm being destructive or mean or angry or something that's kind of toxic. And I make, I recognize it. I make a joke about it. And then I'm just like, oh, well, whatever. I don't know what to do. So I'm going to keep going, right? That's comedians do everything.

You cannot find a comedian who's not deeply wounded and isn't using comedy to deal with their emotions. It's a productive way to deal with stuff if you're not going to deal with it directly, right? And I just put that in writing. Writing is a great way to deal with your emotions as well and to feel your emotions. And that's absolutely what I was doing. I was only able to feel 5% or 10% of my stuff then.

You know, you get to the point where you're like, you're writing and you're like, what do I say next? You know, and I literally, it's like if I had my, the Tucker Max number one rule to writing for myself at least is whenever that question comes, the answer is always whatever the truth is. What's the truth? And I made that commitment to myself very early on. The honest to God truth is because I wasn't that great of a writer.

Like in terms of technical fancy sentences. And I was good, but I wasn't one of the greats at all. And so I'm like, well, how, why is anyone going to read my stuff? And I'm like,

Well, everyone wants to know the truth. Yeah. Like if you tell the truth, people will stop and listen. One of my favorite lines ever on this podcast is, do you want to be interesting? If so, tell your story with uncommon honesty. Yes. And I think that's what you did. That's exactly what I did. Even though I was totally dissociated and totally messed up emotionally in so many ways, I told the truth about it.

the best I could in the moment, right? I mean, bro, when I go back and read my stuff now, some of it, it's still funny, but then there's also like, I'm like, oh my God, this dude is so sad and so messed up and he doesn't see any of it. It's kind of funny. I'll meet people like this now who are at that stage in their life and like, oh, my friends tell me I'm just like you. And I'm like,

You kind of are. And I know what your next 20 years is going to be like, man. It's not going to be super fun in certain ways. I feel so much compassion for that dude because he was suffering so much, had no idea how to deal with it. Like comedians do it. Most creatives turn their suffering into art. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

memoir is one of the most powerful therapeutic modalities that exists. And in fact, David, it's crazy. So you know about like the social science controversy over the last couple of years where like almost all social science results- The replication crisis. Right, the replication crisis. Yeah. Like 50 to 70% of them don't replicate, right? One of the most robust findings in the broadest field, all of social sciences prior to the replication crisis that has survived

is journaling about your life has the best therapeutic, tangible, measurable therapeutic impacts. Is that right? Like at UT, Perlmutter has done most of the research or a lot of it, not all of it, but he's done a ton of it. Like he and a couple of other people in the field did a whole nother bevy of studies after the replication crisis came up and they actually scored a little bit better, right? So if you want to...

Dig into your emotions. One of the safest, easiest ways

but most impactful ways is writing about your life. Doesn't necessarily have to be a memoir as a book, right? But dude, memoir is one of the most effective therapeutic practices out there. So when I hear that, I say, okay, that's great for Tucker. That's great for David. But what makes a memoir take the leap from this is a really good journal entry that's going to help me to this is something that's going to entertain the reader? First question I always ask people is why?

Like, I'm a big believer everyone has a memoir in them and everyone would do very well to write one in their life. But I never use the word should or have to. That's shame-based. And you have to write a memoir. No, you don't have to write a memoir. Like, that's nonsense, right? That's just me trying to project what worked for me and what I like onto the world. I really do think it's a great thing to do and it's super effective and I believe it and I have proof in my life and literally thousands of other people I've helped doing it. But it doesn't mean you don't have to.

That's not true. But a lot of people want it. Like they feel like they want to. And so I like to start there. If you feel like you might want to write a memoir, the first question to ask is why.

Why do I want to do this? Right. And a lot of people actually haven't really, which is fine. They haven't unpacked explicitly to themselves. Well, it's more of a feeling, right? Which is okay. But I like to get people to make the reason explicit, to start going inside and feeling, right? And if you really break down all the answers, there's kind of two categories, umbrellas of answers.

There is the I want to tell my story group, right? And those people generally, what they really mean is I want to do some sort of therapeutic process to help me feel my emotions, understand my life and my story, and most importantly, tell myself the truth about it. The other umbrella, and I...

I'm probably going to use harsh language, but it's not a right or wrong umbrella. I'm not trying to be judgmental. The other umbrella is what I call the legacy group. Right. Like they want to leave – you hear people say, I want to leave a legacy, right? Yeah.

Which is great. Nothing wrong with that. If you get on the surface and you really ask them and they're honest in their answers, what they really want is they want people to think about them a certain way. I was going to say control perception. Exactly. See, like even control perception, true. But I'm like, ah, I feel so judgmental. I'm trying not to be judgmental about it. But

Because that's just me projecting my own stuff, right? Yeah. I think it's a totally valid way to do it. It's a valid desire. It's not where I am in my life, right? But that group of people, they tend to be the ones who are like...

you know, like the CEOs of big companies or magnets of industry or this celebrities, right? Yeah. Yeah. I want to tell my story. Of course I want to tell the truth. My rule with them now, I won't take a celeb memoir one, unless it pays a lot, but then also like, are you going to tell the truth? Right. And, um,

So when you're working with a celebrity, big name person, we all know about them, been on TV, movies, whatever, and you're sitting down with them to get that information out of them, how do you cross, get beyond the sort of protective walls that we've built up so that you can actually get real truth?

The only celeb book I've ever done who didn't make me sign an NDA was Tiffany Haddish. And that's the best one I've done. And I caught her. I met her before she really blew up in Hollywood. And she kind of came from nothing. And so it was just before the system got hold of her and made her understand you can't tell the whole truth if you want to get big. And so she told, if you go read the reviews on Audible, Audible specifically,

It's all these young black girls who like tons of them like, oh, my God, I had no idea. Celebrities face the same things I did. The story was so inspiring because Tiffany, I mean, she talked about how like she married this dude who is so physically violent, beat her ass like police reports.

And like she went back to him. Like it was this incredible honesty about the mindset of a woman who comes from where she came from in a violent, abusive relationship. And it's just part of the book, right? Yeah. And that's why I did the book with her. Because at the time she was not a big star and there was no money in the advance. And so I was like, do you want to tell the truth? She's like, yeah. I'm like, okay, if you're really willing to tell the truth. And she did. And that book was a joy.

Every other celeb book I've worked on, I had to sign, you know, all these NDAs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They sit there and so sincere because they're amazing pretenders, right? And they do like do one of the ones I work with is as big a name as it gets. And this person works

Isn't it amazing? I believe this person believed that they wanted to tell the truth. I do actually. Because like, I don't think you can fool me, but you can definitely fool yourself enough that you fool me. Right. And this person fooled me. Man, we sat down and I earned this person's trust. And they told me their whole story. And it's incredible. Their story is like, it's still to this day, it hits me.

And then when it came time to actually edit, no fucking way, bro. All the, like, I mean, it was like, it was man, it was soul crushing to me. And it said, which is part of my, I was investing too much in them and, and they wouldn't, they wouldn't do it. But this is one of the Tucker max core ideas, right? That there's really two things going on that we need to separate.

One is writing your memoir and then the other is publishing your memoir. And there's actually three things you can do. You can write it, keep it for yourself. Then you can publish it, share it with the world. And then you can also write it and kind of keep it private, print a few copies and share it with people. That's one of those things where when I tell people like they have an absolute epiphany that they can't believe that they have three options.

In fact, I teach... When I teach memoir, you don't have to publish it. And in fact, for many people, they don't need to publish it to get the benefit, right? Because like what...

I don't like to work with the legacy people. Nothing wrong with them, right? But I refer them to scribe or other people, right? Because if you want legacy, then you need to work with someone who's there. What they want to do is get you into your book the way you want to look. Nothing wrong with that. It does not work. I want to spend my time with the people who want to tell the truth as best they can, who want to look into themselves and look at their past, feel the stuff they have to feel,

Or they can feel, right? I'm not like, oh, you have to tell your whole truth. My whole truth wasn't accessible to me when I was 28. I told them I did the best I could, right? And now I'm not arrogant enough to think, oh, yeah, I'm so enlightened. I know everything about me. No, I'm just going to do the best I can, right? And so wherever you are, do the best you can. Tell as much of the truth of your life as you can.

Let's go there and let's do that. And those are the people I work with. But so many people are so afraid to tell the truth because of the consequences of the truth. And I get it. There can be real legal consequences, right? Yes. Or real social consequences. And so we always start with the assumption you don't have to publish it and you're not going to make a final decision on how you publish it until you're done with a manuscript, right? Right.

And, and, uh, and the people that freeze people up and they realize, oh, this sandbox is mine and it's private and I don't have to show it to anybody. I now have a space to be as open and free as I want.

And I'll deal with everything else later. Right? And then when they kind of get their rough draft, I'll read through it with them. You know, if they want me to, we'll edit. I'll, you know, go through and then help them. I'll talk through. Okay. If you want to publicly publish it, it'll help a lot of people. You'll get these benefits. Here's the potential downsides.

And then they can make that decision. Or if you want to just print 50 copies or 10 copies, give it to your 10 closest friends, but then your mom doesn't see it, right? And then your boss doesn't see it. You don't have to worry about those consequences. That's valid. Or you can put it in a drawer.

How do you think about structuring a memoir? Because, I mean, if I were to write a memoir, I'm just sitting here, and I'd say, I guess what I would do is I'd probably write out a list of things that happened, but I have no idea what I structured chronologically, what I structured in another way. There's so much. How do I find the...

the shape of this story? It's a great question. So, and really the number two question, after we go through, why are you doing this? Yeah. And to get real clear which category, legacy or truth,

And then the next question, actually, before you get to structure, what part of your life do you want to tell the story of? Right? Because people have a lot of head baggage about like, am I writing a memoir or an autobiography? A lot of people have this idea that autobiography is everything in your life and a memoir is a part of your life. I think it's all a nonsense distinction.

There is no possible way you can tell the whole story of your life because that would just be like everything that happened in your life. Even the most complete autobiography ever is not everything that happened in their life, right? Totally. So there's always a decision of what part of your life do you want to talk about. And then someone like you and me, a lot of people have lived big lives and a lot happened. And, bro, I wrote four memoirs.

And they comprehensively dealt with a small section of my life. Even when I was writing those books, I'd meet people and they'd be like, you're nothing like I would expect. I'm like, what do you mean? They're like, well, why aren't you drunk, like under a table yelling at people? I'm like, bro, it's 11 a.m. on Thursday. Like, I'm wearing Whole Foods. Like, what's wrong with you? But they literally couldn't conceive of the fact that I had a life outside of what happened in those books. Right. You can take...

very thin slices of your life. You could write about your relationship with your mom and nothing else. And that probably will encompass a lot of other things, right? But, um,

So the next decision is what part of my life do I want to tell? Like my whole life, basically story, understanding you always got to make decisions. Or do I want to talk about write a passage, right? Do I want to talk about how I started it? You know, how I came to decide to end it, how it ended, all that. Those are different books. So first you start with what? And I always, Brian, I can't tell you how many people I'll tell them. Have you thought that maybe you have three or four memoirs to write that you could write? And they'll be like, oh,

God, I hadn't thought about that. And then they're free to, okay, this will be my second memoir. This will be my third. It's really interesting that you say that because-

One of the number one things I've seen talking to students is that what they get hung up on is early on, if they're not experienced writers, they just try to write about too much. They're like, if they're interested in AI, the history of artificial intelligence in the digital age, when a good piece is write about AI and how it's impacting the robotics industry for manufacturing rockets. Okay, that is actually a good piece. And once you can give people the...

I want to say confidence, probably not the right word, just the permission to just really chop off a very narrow slice of reality and focus on that. The writing gets way better. It gets much better because it's focused. And now your original question is now easy to answer. How do I structure a memoir is easy if you say, I'm only going to write about the story or write a passage.

Then it's like, oh, well, it started here. It ended here. And I'm going to talk about that chronologically is obviously the way to do it, right? So the structure question is almost always answered by the what memoir am I writing question. You see what I'm saying? Yep. But yeah, no, dude, your point about like so many people are like, oh, I've got so much to write. Okay, you can write about all of it eventually. Right.

What are you going to do this time? Where are you going to start? And what I've seen, man, is that people will start big. They'll start writing. They'll realize it's too big. They'll pick a slice. They'll chop off that slice. They'll dive super deep into that. They'll realize everything they thought they wanted to cover is actually at least tangentially hit on.

In that slice, they'll finish the slice. They love it. And now they actually want to keep going and they want, and they realize, oh yeah, I can just do a slice at a time. If you think about the great memoirists, um, almost all of them do that. Like, uh, do you remember Augustine Burroughs? He wrote like, uh, uh, uh, running with scissors, which is huge, like 10, 20 years ago. Uh, Donald Miller, Mary Carr. There's a most great memoirists, right? Three, four or five memoirs.

Even if they have quote-unquote boring lives where not a lot happened...

You can still unpack a very standard American life. Like in three books might not be enough to unpack because you've got yourself, your family, your actions with your husband, wife, partner, whatever. Like there's a lot to unpack. So that is an important implicit point that you just made. You don't need a crazy life to write a great memoir. No, not at all. Everyone saw Downton Abbey, right? And like Downton Abbey is episode, entire episodes are,

where dudes are seriously upset about who the first footman and second footman is and who's putting the third salad fork down. Like, you couldn't imagine lower stakes than that, right? Yeah. But Downton Abbey's still riveting because those people really cared about that. And we all know people who...

who have a lot of intensely... who care a lot about low-stakes stuff. And they got really into what those people actually felt, right? And if you... You can do the same thing with your life. Well, also, a lot of times, the most simple things are the most relatable. Like, you ever...

You ever look at yourself in the mirror and you see your eyes, like you look into your eyes, you almost like talk yourself up. You're like, all right, you got this dude, right? Like that's the most simple thing ever. And it's very relatable because it is so simple, but it's not impressive or grand at all. So if you're genuinely honest about your life,

It's interesting. So few people are really honest. Like, yeah, hey, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Bro, no, you're not. I know you're not. You can look at somebody like, I know you're not doing good. I know what's going on in your life. I don't know if you've had this experience. I'm sure, I bet you have. But you'll meet somebody who like, I can actually think of it, Tom. This is in college. The janitor in the dorm I lived in, right? He was this old black guy.

It seemed like just the most normal, down-to-earth, like average dude you could ever imagine. And one time we were in the comments room and he was in there. And it was like kind of late at night. And me and two girls were talking to him. And he was such a nice guy. I was joking with him. I knew him pretty well. The other two girls like were very deeply empathic. And they just, I don't know what they sensed or whatever. They just started talking to him and asking him questions. And he started telling us his life story.

Bro, it's the craziest story I've ever, to this day, it's a top five craziest story I've ever heard in my life. Right? And he didn't think it was crazy. Right. Right? It's like this whole story about how he met his wife and, you know, like a civil rights movement and all this crap. And it was riveting. It was amazing. We sat there for three hours and talked to this guy.

And he just opened up to us for whatever we probably because those two girls are just very empathic and he just felt safe with them. And it was amazing. I've never met a person that if you gave me enough time to talk to them and ask them questions, didn't have an interesting story. Everyone has love, heartbreak, sadness, disappointment, joy, accomplishments, joy.

It's all there for everybody, right? Yeah, some people did way more stuff that's noteworthy. But there is no life so small that it does not contain the entire human experience.

you know, and you can put that down on paper in a way that's totally riveting. If you're honest about your emotions, it doesn't have to be the events. It doesn't. It doesn't at all. So many people are like, how can I write a book like yours? Like I didn't have crazy things happen. I'm like,

Broke half my stories on me going out and getting drunk and throwing up on myself and nothing else happens. It's just my experiences, interactions, and I wrote it up in a funny way. And I let you into the inside of what was a miserable night for me. When you were writing and you're living in South Florida at the time, just been fired, I guess, from your dad's restaurant, a law firm right before. And you're writing these funny emails to friends. What...

Did you learn about what constitutes humor? Yeah. Oh, such a good question. You can always be funny.

If you're willing to make, like point out an absurdity that you recognize, right? Usually that means making fun of yourself, right? But a lot of people will take that too far where it's like they turn themselves into a clown, right? And of course I did that at times. Like that's a normal thing. My favorite way to teach humor, and I'm not saying this is the best or the only way. My favorite way is the court jester.

And I'll tell you why. Do you know why the court jester? The court jester was a real role and has been for almost every aristocracy, some form of a court jester. In the West, we think of the court jester because that's the kind of European aristocratic model. But there were other forms of that. Do you know why the court jester exists? No idea. Bro, it's crazy. And the history of it, you can actually, I can't remember the name of the book. And the jester is the only person who can tell the truth to the king without being killed.

Great humor is speaking the truth that everyone sees and feels, but no one's willing to say. So you know you're actually being funny. Especially in modern society, you know you're funny if people are mad at you. Some people are mad at you. If everyone's mad at you, you're probably just being an asshole, right? Right. But there's a ton of comedians now who are coming up.

I think Dave Smith maybe. I can't remember all their names. Some really, really funny ones. Really good ones who are speak truth to power now is them talking about like the absurdity of like a democratic power politics. When I was coming up, it was the other way. Dude, 20. It's so crazy because I'm old enough where I've seen the shift.

when I was coming up, read my books, making fun of like fundamentalist Christian Republicans. They were the ones in power and like they were the ones who were shaming comedians. It's totally shifted now. It's like the other side. And like a lot of these comedians I know, like they haven't changed. I might.

sense of humor hasn't really changed right and it's like oh those guys used to be the shamers now it's these guys it's crazy that's how you know who's in power is who's mad at the comedians that's what humor is if you uh i should in general the other form of humor and these you can put these two together as absurdities right which is not necessarily about power and that you can do that and that's funny and that's more of like a

I'm not trying to be disparaging. That's like a Mr. Rogers style humor, right? Which is okay. Sure. Or Bozo the Clown or that kind of stuff. Circus style humor. But like Dave Chappelle. Dave Chappelle has been speaking truth to power for 20 years. And you can see who he goes after.

based on who he's not allowed to go after. It's totally changed. So make this concrete for me. So if I'm sitting down at my computer later this afternoon and I'm like, I want to write a funny story, a funny sentence, what do I need to be thinking? I'll tell you how I'm funny. I write until I say something that is true and I know people are going to get upset or I know I'm not supposed to. And then I'll think, how do I make this funny?

Huh. Right. Like this, this is, this is true. And this could be funny. You know, like, you know, some, the, the, the battle of the sex is always fertile ground for jokes. Right. Cause there's so much stuff you're not allowed to say, or that's taboo. Right. So that's an easy place.

Anything like that, man. That's where if you try to be funny, you're going to force it. But if you find yourself speaking truths you think might upset people or that some people would be upset by or would be counterintuitive or controversial, that's where I put the joke. That's why the king didn't kill the jester. Because the jester said, oh, it's just humor. I'm just joking. Oh, we could laugh about it and dismiss it. Oscar Wilde.

If you tell the truth, make them laugh or they're going to kill you. He's talking about jesters. Oscar Wilde came out of that tradition, right? That's the European, the court jester tradition. Oscar Wilde was that. So what's going on when you're reading memoirs and you're like,

Let's take this. The story is authentic. The story is worth telling. They're trying to be sincere, but you read it and the story sucks. What's going on? Because they're not. They're not telling the truth. They are covering something. Dude, it's so crazy. I've gotten so good at this, or so experienced at this. Authors in my program will say, hey, do I need to send you like 50 pages to get it? I'm like, no. They're like, well, how much? Like 10 at least. I'm like, honestly, two pages is probably more than enough.

I'll see everything into it. Like, how could you do that? When you had, there's a great German term, finger spitzing feel. Yeah. Which is like Robert Green. Yeah. Yeah. Fingers that feel, um, I have such a fingertip feel for memoir. I can tell if you're telling the truth, almost a couple of paragraphs there, you know, you can just tell, are they, it's not the truth, like with a capital T, like the,

you know the scientific you know facts it's more are they telling me what they actually think and feel and believe well it's crazy because i've gotten very good at identifying up and coming creators yeah and people are like how do you know i can read one tweet dude one tweet if you give me three sentences i can tell who just who switched on who has a way to communicate you get a little bit of distinctiveness originality and language and i'm like all right they got game the

One tweet. Dude, it's 100. I don't know if I'm that good with memoir. It takes me at least, because it depends on the person. Memoir's different. Yeah, but two, three paragraphs, I'm with you. Yeah. Yeah. 100%, man. 100%. You can just feel it, man. Are they really telling me what they think and feel and believe?

See, that's an important point. I'm not sitting here telling you that my first book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, was the truth. No, man. I think I get almost everything wrong in there. If I look back at myself, I am such a fundamentally different person in so many, not always, core thing.

Truth has always been my highest value. Now, it was then. Sovereignty has always been my second highest value. Still now, still then. Relationships are probably my third highest value now. They probably weren't on the table then for me, right? So some things have changed. But how I thought about the world, how I thought the world worked, what I thought were good goals, how I lived my life fundamentally changed. It's not that I got things right then. I was right about the truth. I just told my truth.

Right? That's all anyone can do. We've got a woman in my group right now. Why don't we get too many details? Great woman. Just started on her emotional journey. She's telling her truth.

And it's nowhere near as deep as like another person I'm thinking about who's like really deep in, done a ton of psychedelic medicine, therapy. Like they're really switched on emotionally, spiritually. That person's 10 times deeper than the other one. I consider them both at the same level because they're both telling the same amount of truth they're able to access for themselves.

Does that make sense? Yep. And she'll go deeper. She'll go deeper. She'll probably write 10 memoirs and the 10th one will be 50 times deeper than the first one, but they'll all be great because they're her expressing her true self as she is in that moment.

When I spoke to Rob Henderson, he said, he talked to you and you said to him, write about your scars, not your wounds. Yeah. What does that mean? That's a saying in our program is, the saying is actually write from your scars, not from your wounds. Right? It's not, no, you should write about your scars and your wounds. But writing from, imagine you have a cut, right? And it's bleeding. Right.

You can't really do much until you get that cut. First stop bleeding, then the appropriate treatment to make sure it won't keep bleeding in the future. Then let it heal.

Right? When it's scarred up, you go back to working out or whatever. Right? But if you try and work out, let's say work out, you try and work out with a bleeding wound on, it doesn't work. Right? Same thing is true for memoir. So people have been through a lot of trauma in their life. I'm one of them actually. A ton of trauma. If I just...

start to access, let's say my relationship with my mom, right? It was very, very difficult. It was about four or five years ago I really got into the depth of that and I had a lot of grief around that relationship. And so, bro, for a year, it didn't matter what therapeutic modality I did. Yoga, MDMA, talking to my therapist, nothing came up but grief. It was always grief and

It didn't matter what I wanted to talk about. It was great. If I tried to write about my mom, then it's going to be an emotional vomit of disconnected grief all over the reader. You don't want to read that unprocessed grief. That's not that's not yours. That's nonsense. That's mine.

I need to, I need to heal my wound right now. Uh, I'm literally writing about in my current memoir, I'm writing about kind of how it went from like old Tucker to, you know, dad and father and rancher and all this sort of stuff. Um,

I'm going to write about my grief, but I'm going to write about it now from a healed place. So I can look at it and say what I felt, what those emotions were like, how hard they were for me in that moment. So writing from a wound is me vomiting unprocessed emotion on you, the reader.

Like, here, take this. You know, like you have a conversation with someone. Like, oh, how you doing? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. They're just trauma dumping. Oh, it's like, oh, stop dumping your shit on me, right? That's what writing from a scar is, man. My relationship with my mom was tough. Let me tell you how. Totally different. Do you ever have that thing where a lot of times...

I remember a year and a half ago, I was just going through something really hard and I sat up in my office and I was literally just in tears for like three hours and I wrote a few thousand words. And even I go back to that night, read the descriptions of the emotions and I'm like, what am I, Shakespeare? I don't know how I accessed that. And the thing is now, if I were to go back, I can't...

This is specifically with pain, with pain. I feel like I can't describe pain as well unless I'm in it. Yeah. So when you're writing from your scars, how do you get to that pain? It's the same thing when you actually hurt yourself, right? Like the pain of you've just broken your arm. It's been 15 seconds. You're in agony. What you're explaining then is so much more vivid than what you can explain two years later. How do you get back to that? Yeah. Okay. So, man, that's such a good point. No one's ever asked me this question. It's a great question.

When I say don't write from your wounds, honestly, the more precise statement should be don't publish from your wounds. Right? I have a lot of journal entries that are unprocessed vomiting. That's the place for unprocessed is your journal. Right? So if writing helps you bring something up,

And just bringing it up helps process it. Fuck yeah, do that. That's not a blog post or a memoir though. Not a finished one. I started journaling in 2014. But I had like a three-month period in 2007 where I sat down every day and journaled. And it was – you're exactly right. When I go back and read that, it is –

I was in deep pain that things were really bad for me. Some deep stuff was coming up. I had no idea what to do or how to pro I was stuff was coming up that I was totally unprepared for at that point. If it came up now, I could handle it. I was unprepared. And the only thing I knew how to do was right. And so I journaled and, uh,

I don't want to say the writing was very good, but there were a lot of deeply poetic, resonant parts in there. I did a really good job describing what the process I was going through. When I go back and read it now, I don't know about you, man. I actually go back to some of those moments. Like, it's like, that's why I couldn't, David, I couldn't read that for seconds.

Eight years. Yeah. Because reading it was so triggering. It brought the stuff back up. Right? So if you want...

to use writing, journaling, as a means of processing emotion. I think that's awesome. All the research we talk about Pennebaker, that's what that is. That works. I highly recommend it. Dump everything there. That's a place to put it. Going back to it, to use it as inspiration, also good. Like what I'll do is I'll vomit it out on the page.

And it's really hard, Rundu. Like, I hate it. I hate that. I can very distinctly think of a couple of stories I've written where I hated that. I hated doing it. It was suffering. It was awful. Because bringing up old emotions you pushed away for decades, maybe, is never fun. You push it away for a reason. And then I will just...

get it as fast as i can and then i'll come back to it and i will in essence process it by editing it you know if it's too raw for me to even feel through right bro there's a reason there's a lot of ways to kind of heal trauma and to get into that space and and access those emotions and bring them up i for me psychedelic medicine has been amazing because especially mdma uh because it it

It helps me feel loved and safe. And that, which is something I never felt as a kid. And so then that stuff can come up for me. Right. Well, I know people who didn't have childhoods like that. They can get to that shit from yoga, which is like, Oh, I don't know how they do it, but that's awesome. Good for them. But like, uh, I don't like take MDMA and go, right. But like, if I hit something bad or something, something bad, something really challenging and hard for me, that's what I have to do is either I vomited out and then come back to it later.

Or if I can't, I will do an MDMA session. I will let it come up and then like the next day or sometimes if I do it early in the morning, late that night, I will actually write it still in that state. You know, then when I'm ready to process, essentially when I'm ready to turn the wound into a scar, I will come back and edit that through.

And through the process of editing is how I think I turn my deepest, most bloody wounds into scars. Man, you're a good interviewer, dude. That's awesome. Thank you. That's really good. It's funny because you know what we call, what we teach in memoirs, we teach the first draft is called the vomit draft. We tell people, and that's what we literally call it because of that. Like what we're trying to do is to get people to vomit out, to...

Let all the cuts bleed on the page. Yeah. Bleed on the page the first time because often it's the only way to get it out. Like when you're, if you drink too much and you're vomiting, like you just want to get it out, right? Like you're not trying to make it right. Yeah. That's why we call it a vomit draft. But I hadn't thought about turning it from a wound to a scar is editing. If you're choosing memoir as your therapeutic modality, it's not the only way, of course, right? But that's what that process serves in memoir. Yeah. Yeah.

You mentioned the word diary a few minutes ago. What is it about Anne Frank's diary that is so good? What was she able to access? Yeah.

A lot of the things people tell you about kids aren't true. One of the things that everyone tells you that is true is kids don't give a shit. They'll just speak the truth, right? Because they don't know what they're not supposed to say yet or what's socially unacceptable. And my wife and I have raised our kids so that we, as much as we can, we never get upset or shame them ever for telling the truth. Even if it's something like,

You know, some friend will come over and my three-year-old will say, Daddy, your friend's fat. And I'm like, no. But I don't get upset. Like, okay, hold on. There's other ways to say this. And so, but they will tell the truth. They don't care, man. They don't care. They don't give a shit. I think Anne Frank was one of those kids who had those, you can tell she had really pretty good connected parents who cared about her the way she writes about them.

And I think she felt that love and that acceptance. And her journal was her place where she knew she could at least be honest with herself, right? Like so many people are not honest with themselves and they raise their kids to be that way. At a minimum, Anne's parents, Otto, I think was her dad's name, raised her to be honest with herself.

And her journal was her place to be honest with herself. She wrote it as a journal. I don't think it's a diary. She never thought anyone would read it, obviously. And she's one of those kids. She might even have been what we now think of as a little bit Aspie, right? Asperger's, you know? Yeah. Aspie people was like, oh, this, this, this, this. I love Asperger's people because I'm like, that's right. I know I'm going to get the truth from you. Totally. And so she may have been a little bit like that as well or either or both.

And so her journal is just a raw, unvarnished 12-year-old girl truth. You know, if you read the unedited version, she talks about her period in there. Like she's just absolutely telling you what she thinks and feels. And that's why it's good. It's not...

It's not that well-written. She doesn't use flowery prose. She doesn't, no one quotes, there's no Anne Frank turns a phrase. You know, like there's a million Oscar Wilde turns a phrase, right? He's an amazing technical writer, a master of language. She's not a master of language. She tells the truth. That book is the iconic example I give for everybody. When they say, but I'm not a good writer, how could I write a memoir? I said, Anne Frank wasn't a good writer.

And they're like, oh, yeah. And literally, I want you to go read her book. Go read five pages and tell me a sentence that you remember, like a word choice. No, you don't remember. That's what a great writer is, is a master of language. A great storyteller and memoir is someone who tells the truth. When you say great storytelling, how do you think about the pacing of stories?

What Emily and I teach in our program about story is we tell people we're not going to focus on teaching you how to be a great writer, right? Like what you teach. Being a great writer is an important skill. It's a great skill. It can serve you so well in life. But we actually totally discard that in memoir because we want people to focus on story and

But the way we teach story is different than anyone else. Like if you're trying, if you're a screenwriter and you want to learn story, um, you're going to learn in a totally different way, right? You're going to read, you know, save the cat or one of the, you know, the writer's journey or one of those, and they're going to teach an amazing structure. And you'll write, if you have the creativity, you'll write absolute killer screenplays. What we tell people with story, man is so simple.

What happened? Like we literally have an, we call it an algorithm just so people will put it in their head. There's three questions to tell a great story. What happened? How did you feel? What happened next? How did you feel? What happened next? How did you feel? In memoir, this is one of the key things to, you got to understand about memoir. I'm not reading your memoir to learn about you. I'm not. You could be the most interesting, famous person on earth. I'm still not reading your memoir to learn about you.

I'm reading your memoir to learn about me. So if you tell the truth, tell me the truth about you and your life, I will take those reflections and be able to see myself clear. Like if you're deeply insightful about your journey, like what we were talking about before we started, right? About you telling me about Rite of Passage and you were really honest and insightful about what happened and why you're closing it down and all that. And I told you, bro, this is super interesting. And you didn't understand why. Right?

Because I am a creative entrepreneur too. And you were, I can reflect myself and my experiences on your honesty and actually can learn about my self.

from you if you're telling the truth. But if you're posturing, if you're telling me things that you think are going to make you look good, the odds that I'm going to actually be able to get insight in myself are almost nil. I want to go through that algorithm. So let's do one, two, three. Talk to me about each one. All right. What happened?

It seems simple, right? Except it's not that simple because obviously don't tell me everything. I woke up today. My phone beeped three times before I hit the snooze button. Then I decided, do I want coffee or tea? Oh God, stop it. Come on. It's what happened that mattered, right? To you.

And the cool part is you get to decide that. You get to decide what matters, right? Which is, we can get this in a second, but one of the core things that I think make memoir important to people as a therapeutic modality is you get to decide, part of writing a memoir is deciding what your story is. You don't get to decide what happened, right? Like what happened, happened. My mom abandoned me. My dad left in a certain, like I don't get to change any of that, right? I don't get to have a magical dad, right? Right.

I do get to decide what that means to me, though. The events of my life, the story I tell out of that, are both my actions and how I look at it. That's optimism. How am I going to look at this set of facts that is unchanging, right? Okay, what happens? So you're deciding what to talk, what's important.

What matters to me? What events shaped me? What things do I still consider instructive? What do I take lessons from? How did you feel? Not what did you think? You're going to write what you thought anyway. How did you feel? Because most people are going to cover the think anywhere. But the way people avoid emotions is think, generally speaking.

And for what the quality, the context, the meaning in your life is all emotion. It's all emotion. All thinking really does is help you contextualize that.

help you. It's sort of like a spreadsheet versus a great glass of wine. Both are important, right? But they're not replacements for each other, right? I have friends of the spreadsheets of all their wine, all that sort of stuff, right? I'm like, yeah, but how did this one take? That's an emotional experience. You can have both. You can have the spreadsheet of your seller and you can also be deeply invested in your experience of that wine. It's not either or thing.

So, but I want people to focus on how they felt because that is how you get to your truth. You know, how did you, even if, even if a lot of times you don't understand what we see all the time is someone who tells them, so my story is ABC and they sit down to write and they keep writing how they felt and they realize, wait a minute, I've told myself my story is ABC, but it's actually not. It's actually A F G.

Oh my God. That happens only all the time. Like really every time, every time in memoir, uh, it happened. And in fact, it just happened to me. I've been stuck. I've been writing my next memoir. I've been stuck on it. And I realized I was stuck because I was trying, I was writing from a legacy perspective. I was trying to write Tucker Max's next memoir.

Instead of just sitting down and writing the truth of how I felt every sentence. Like we tell people literally, if you write one true sentence after another, what happened, how you felt, what happened next. What happened next is important because it helps you start to see connections between events and emotions. So it's not just what happened, how'd you feel, what happened. It's not like, oh yeah, I got hit by a car, I felt sad. Then I, you know, like, no, no, it's what happened next, right? Right?

Because that gets people understanding it's a cycle. What happened next? I felt this. Oh, my God. Then I did this. I didn't realize. And then this and then this. And now I can start to see the connections in my life. That's what we call therapeutic. Rate therapy does that. This is a therapy. It's not a replacement for talk therapy with a psychologist, but it's a therapeutic process, right?

And so I was writing Tucker Max's next memoir instead of true sentences. And so we tell people, if you literally follow that algorithm and write true sentences, you

you are going to be able to get very deep, probably deeper you've ever gotten, right? For most people, you're going to see your life in a new way. And then also you get to kind of decide what it means and then what you're going to do going forward too. This is a, I'll give you a really good example what it means. So my parents, they didn't really sexually, didn't really, they didn't sexually or physically abuse me, right? But I had a very traumatic childhood because they were

you know, boomer narcissists, they basically abandoned me without like the white middle class abandonment, right? Like where I was essentially alone as a kid growing up, right? In all shape, emotionally. And that was really hard, David. And I had to go through all the talk therapy years and psychedelic work and all this other stuff to bring all that stuff up, feel it, you know, like let go of the charge. None of the events changed, right? But I'm in such a better place now

But you know the way I talk about it now, and this is true, but it took me years to get here to understand this. Writing about it and feeling it, they actually gave me a gift because they didn't mix a lot of love with their abuse. Hmm.

Most people, their parents really loved them the best they could, but their parents were traumatized. And so their parents dumped all their shit on them. That's my wife, right? Her mom's amazing and a sweet, amazing grandmother, an amazing woman, but was like in certain specific ways a really shitty mom and dumped all her anxiety on my wife, Veronica. And Veronica resents that, but she loves her deeply. And so they have this weird, toxic love-hate relationship, right? Yeah.

My parents didn't do any of that. They just neglected me. And so as a result, I'm so independent thinking and I'm such independent acting. And so like, bro, I knew when I was three that Santa didn't exist. Like I don't, it's why I am so, such a true, genuine, critical thinker and why I'm so independent minded. And it's helped me so much in my life.

become a competent formidable man right because i never thought i had to rely on abusers for love like my wife does yeah right it's been like a superpower now that superpower came with some downside right right okay but like the story of my life is not my parents neglected me abandoned me and everything's shitty the story was yeah they neglected they abandoned me it was hard

But as a result, I developed these other skills that they don't necessarily get credit. Like my dad's like, yep, I banded him and look how great he is. You don't get credit for that, dad. But like that's the story of my life that I tell myself. And it is sad and grief stricken and also super inspiring.

Like any great story, right? And so that's the story. And so that's the story right now I tell about my life and I've chosen to act out. Hey, I want to tell you about a new site that I built called Writing Examples. We take writers like Seinfeld, Orwell, and break down what makes their writing so good. If that sounds like it's kind of your thing, well, go to writingexamples.com.

And if you go there, you enter your email, I'll send you my three favorite editions right away. All right, back to the episode. When you're writing and that grief really comes up, because I've had moments like this where I'm sitting down and...

trying to share something and i just like i just start crying like you you're you're you're just in tears and you're just you're sitting there it's it sounds so dramatic talking about it but it's actually so undramatic you're sitting there in a room alone by yourself and by yourself and it's like 10 a.m and you're just crying and you're just trying to process something i'm laughing because i've done it and you're trying to get the stuff out what do you do in that moment do you do you

Keep going. You keep going. Bro, that is a major gift. Stay with it as long as you can. The way that you heal trauma, right? Like go, the iconic book on trauma, Bessel van der Kert's Body Keeps the Score, right? All trauma is you have an unprocessed, a feeling you have not felt that is stored in your body, literally, right? And it is essentially, think of it almost like a point, a point,

Like a bag of not poison. It is because it's stored in there. Shouldn't be emotional flow. It's stored in there. It's not flowing. And it's like leaking some sort of low grade poison. Right. And so what you're doing in that moment is healing yourself. You are bringing a stuck emotion up.

And feeling. You're not feeling grief in that moment for what happened in that moment, right? Like you're not grieving because you're sat in your apartment alone. Like that's fine. You're grieving because your mom yelled at you when you were three and you thought you were going to die. As a three-year-old, right? Or whatever, right? And that's actually healing. So the more you can stay in that moment with that emotion and let it have its say, so to speak,

You can let it go. It doesn't mean the event didn't happen. What is causing the anxiety in you is unfelt emotion. Anxiety is the body's response to depression, which is unfelt emotion. People who love you and care about you doing their best can still totally unintentionally abuse you and not even realize it. And you're still carrying that potentially.

they may not even perceive it as abuse bro i've been at sports games where dads are in enraged yelling at their kids and like i'm like oh the kids are gonna have therapy about that shit later yeah dads honestly think they're they're trying to help their kids gotta toughen up he's gotta get better he's the dad is preparing his child for a world he thinks he needs like there's not a bad guy there

I mean, don't get me wrong. The dad's mistaken. His dad did that to him. It's coming downhill, right? It's sad, but who's the bad guy there? No, still abusive, still traumatic. Not necessarily a bad guy. So as these stories come up, and I do one, two, 45, 46, as I begin to shape my memoir, are you intentional about,

about themes no no no all that does is confuse and fuck up people even someone who's a great writer like you truly because then you start writing to the theme what i just told you dude i fell into this trap i'm one of the all right this is gonna sound arrogant i'm more genuinely one of the great memoirs of my generation and i fell into this trap right i was writing tucker max's next memoir i was writing to create a specific result

Again, that's a legacy style. Nothing wrong with that.

Bro, I teach truth. I teach the tell your story method. That's why I call my company and I was doing the opposite thing. Totally. As soon as I realized that, of course, I laugh and I'm like, oh, dude. But I wasn't focused on writing. Ask what happened? How did I feel? Write the truth about it, right? Which could be what happened next, right? I don't like to make that, write the truth about it as the algorithm. It teaches people this is how you tell a story as you tell the truth.

And it's easier for people to do it that way. But if you start thinking about theme, if you start thinking about all that sort of stuff, that is almost always a way to, if you're writing the truth, if your goal is to tell the truth, that's a way to distract you from truth. Because if you just sit down and tell the truth, there will be themes. They will emerge. Your themes, but what's funny is nine times out of 10, if you tried to tell me what the themes were ahead of time,

You're not going to know. Usually discovering them is an emergent process. Mm-hmm. Right? Now, if we're talking about how George R.R. Martin writes his novels, probably totally different. I'm not a novelist. Novelists are a whole different thing. Like, some novelists just, they call it pantsing. They just, they're like, I don't know, I just create characters and write what they do. I have no idea what they're going to do. Which actually...

Blows my mind. I have no idea how you could do that. That's a crazy idea. I know, right? But then a lot of other novelists are like, no, no, no. I do a whole character arc for all of them. I do character diamonds. I know who they are. I do a basic plot. I understand how it unfolds. Yeah, that's different. You're talking about your story and your experiences, what you felt, right? That's, if you just write the truth, you will see the themes, right?

How do you think about writing dialogue and accessing the truth of dialogue? Because you have this triad where there's like,

fact, fiction, and truth. And I was like, wait, how are those three different things? Yeah. When I teach memoir to people, we'll bring them in. We have a whole workbook. We work them through a whole structure. Basically what I'm telling you right now is like everything we work them through. We don't teach them the structure of writing hardly at all. We teach them to write clearly the basic, the absolute basics, right? Simple and clear, you know, clarity is kindness, that kind of stuff. And that's it. That's all we teach is

Because what I've learned is if I try and teach them how to write for memoir, I'm only talking about for memoir. If I try to teach them how to write, how to do dialogue, how to do this, how to do that, it gets in the way of truth.

And I would rather them develop their own style in this, in the journey of writing their memoir than try and teach them all the different styles or how to do them. Because some people will be like me and they'll, they'll write dialogue books. Like the whole goddamn book is a dialogue, which I love. That's like what I do. Right. I love that. That works great. If I try and teach people that, no man, we've got like the woman I was talking about earlier, her entire, she's one of those people like, um,

It reminds me of Anna Green Gables. Like everything's in her head. There's almost nothing. The entire book is in her head, right? Which is fine. That's a totally valid way to write. There's no dialogue. She has no dialogue in it. Here's what happened. Here's what they said. Here's what I said. But it's all like it's all she's writing as if the thing is contained in her head. I write describing scenes. Both are totally valid and both can be awesome. And I don't want to push people to either one, right? So what I like to do in our program is...

Once their style emerges, I help them get better at their style. Right? Okay, you're a dialogue person. Great. Whatever. My partner, Emily, is much more of an inner head person. So she helps those people get better at their style. Because what the style doesn't matter, man. Like it doesn't. We're not. I don't care. Like this isn't a football team running a wishbone offense. We got to run that offense. No, dude, you get to pick your style. How do you express your truth best? Go. Go.

So when you see bad dialogue, is the problem is it's just not true? Yeah. Bad dialogue is usually someone trying to make a character sound a certain way, right? I almost never see bad dialogue in memoir unless they're lying to themselves, right? Because in memoir, if someone in my group, the people I work with, if they really are dedicated to truth, if they're writing dialogue, it's usually because they remember what the person said and it's what they said.

The implied question might be something like, if you don't remember the exact words, but you definitely remember the conversation or the tenor of the conversation, how do you write a conversation out of that? That's a different skill, right? I do that for sure. Like I for sure have stories that I wrote where I wrote out a lot of the dialogue and I'd be a liar to say I have a photographic memory of every single thing everyone said, but I wrote the dialogue the way I remember it.

And bro, I've had people do this. This is true. Like there's a story about Texas in my first book and the guy in it, Doug, who was with me the whole time, he read the story. He goes, I'll never forget this. He goes,

Yeah, this is true. This is what happened. But this is not at all how I remember it. But think about that statement, right? This is the truth, but it's not at all how I, and he was mainly talking about the dialogue. And he'd be like, what do you mean? He's like, oh, well, this person said this, and this other person said this. I'm like, that's not how I remember it at all.

And so like I kept it the way I had it and it's not, I didn't lie, right? This is a big thing a lot of people get stuck with. What if someone else has a different memory of something I write? Okay. But there are always three truths.

Your truth, my truth, what actually happened. The truth. Right. I don't believe we as humans have perfect access to the truth. Now, I totally believe that an objective truth can exist. I believe humans can do a really good job accessing it, getting it, you know, asymptotically close to it. Sure. You know.

If you can put a man on the moon or Elon Musk can launch a booster back, then clearly we can get really close to something like... Clearly, that's... But if you're talking about social interactions...

And there's actually good psychological studies about this where people don't have an interaction is very films. Everyone will write about it. They'll write completely different things and no one's actually lying. They're just completely different views. You see this in reports of car accidents. Exactly. And what I would posit is that the more emotional the experience, the more varied the recollection. Exactly. And so what I focus on with my students is I tell them, look, um,

I don't care about the truth with a capital T because I'm not a cop. That's not what this is about, right? If there's people whose that's their job and that's cool, they can care about that. I care about you telling your story. Your story. Not your mom's story. Not your dad's story. Not your boyfriend's story. I want you to tell your story and I'm here to help you tell your story. How do you think about originality?

Like originality. Like, do I need to be original in my memoir? Oh, you know, there's been a thousand memoirs about families and relationships with dads. Like, do I really need to write the 10,000th one of those? No, you don't need to. Right. The question is, do you want to? Yeah. There is, if you tell your truth, I don't believe you can write an unoriginal memoir. And I mean that literally and figuratively. I don't think it's possible.

to write an unoriginal memoir. And if you think about the best memoirs, meaning the ones that have impacted the most people, that have sold the most, that are the most resonant, West with the Wind, you know, Beryl... Oh my goodness, the writing in that is unbelievable. Amazing life and amazing writing. But bro, I would tell you, I could actually, we're not going to do this because it would probably be tedious. I could go through page by page with you on West with the Wind

And if she were a client of mine, if she were in my group, I would hammer her. She has a crazy good story. She is a very good writer. She is avoiding her truth. And she is writing, using her writing to hide from her emotions. Is that right? Oh, bro. A lot in there. A lot, a lot. There were at least... Oh, man. I hope I'm not exaggerating, but I think it's like 50 times when I read that book where I'm like...

Well, what happened here? How did you, she'll like, I mean, we were talking about like a couple of times interaction she was having with people or whatever. And she'll just skip over the amount and then they like rob me or whatever. Then this and then like, she then skips like the next event. And I'm like, man, what happened? Like, how did you feel about this? What happened? Like, like what's going on? Like she's, she, a lot of people who have super, super,

eventful lives are very emotionally dissociated. Ask me how I know, right? Like my life right now on a day to day basis is pretty boring, but it's really healthy. When I was 28, it was really exciting, not very healthy. Obviously you don't have to, it's not a must, but that is people who are very in a lot of emotional turmoil, very dissociated,

will run from their stuff by creating external stuff. How many super achievers do you know are that way because they don't want to sit with their emotions in a room for an hour? Mm-hmm.

almost all of them see the man in the mirror sometimes oh dude ask me how i know i was that dude too and so uh so i like i get why she's doing it right like it's not a knock on her like in fact she's the example if you wanted to look at um someone who's a great writer has an amazing story but doesn't go very emotionally deep but still worth reading still a good book

How do you think of titles? Because I was thinking of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. That is not on the formula of that title. I don't think it's on any recommended formula, but it's an insanely cool title. I mean, it's just, wait, what? Okay, I got to go pick this thing up. How do you think about that? The most important thing for a title is that it makes you want to look inside. And there's honestly 10 ways to get there, right?

But the title, especially in the world we live in, where there's a million things trying to get your attention, the title has to get your attention first and foremost.

And, you know, like how do you get attention? Something counterintuitive, something clever, something a clear benefit. Like there's a lot of ways to get attention. Yep. But first get attention. And then second, the second best thing is it makes you, it gives you some idea that

of what's in that book in an engaging way. Like, you don't know what I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is about, but you're like, okay, hold on. I have a general idea, kind of what that might be about, and it's interesting. Let's go. Yeah, it's going to be kind of a bender. Scary close. Hmm. What's that? You know? Snakes on a Plane, I always think of, just immediately sounds terrifying and riveting. Exactly. Right? Now, you don't have to have a... Here's the thing with a memoir. You don't have to have a great title. Huh.

The Diary of Anne Frank, not a great title. I don't think Educated is a very good title. Not at all. Terrible title. West with the Wind. What does it mean? I don't know. I don't care about Going West or the Wind. You don't have to because all books, this is true for all books, but it's 10 times more true than Memoir. The only way to sell books is word of mouth.

Huh? All the fancy marketing plans, all that stuff that what that can do is help you get the first five or 10,000 readers. If the book sucks, it will fall flat. If it's good, it will spread. That's it, bro. I've sold, I've sold 4 million myself. I've helped Tiffany. I helped somebody sell a million. I've helped other celebs. I can't talk about sell more than that.

And, uh, uh, that bro, if there was a formula to this, I'd be selling that formula for a lot of money and other people would be too. It doesn't exist. There isn't a formula for selling books beyond write a great book, get it seated with, uh, your initial readers and let it spread word of mouth. People, bro, I, I, for years, I thought I was a marketing genius because of, I hope this

I'm old enough, mature enough now, wise enough to realize I'm not a marketing genius at all. I wrote a really honest, funny memoir that was the right thing at the right time. Yeah. And it took off. How do you think about the audio book for memoirs? I would say that actually the audio book might be more important for the memoir genre than any other one. Yeah. I think of McConaughey's book.

Like that book, Greenlights, is incredible. The audio book, in a way it's okay, the physical book, but it's that you hear him talk about trips to Australia and all these funny things that happened. And when I think of a memoir, I think about I'm going to read something that's going to help me connect with the writer. Person. And writer.

audiobooks, really hearing their voice. The voice is an instrument. Well, McConaughey's an actor. Of course he's good at it. And the voice is such an instrument of connection that the audiobook seems particularly suited for this genre. Again, very insightful. Great question. I've read all my own audiobooks.

And the only reason I did that is because at the time, publishers were paying authors like five grand to read their audio books. Now they don't. But that was, you know, years ago. And so I was like, fuck yeah, I'll make five grand more. Great. Yeah. And,

I don't think I have that great of a voice, like in terms of... Like I'm much cooler on paper, usually. I'm a pretty cool person, but I'm way cooler on paper. Yeah. So I didn't want to read the audiobook. I wanted to have like... I don't remember what actor I had in my head, but someone with a cooler voice. Like the white version of Samuel L. Jackson should be reading my audiobook, right? Whoever that would have been. But no, they paid five grand, so I did it. But I had a ton of people tell me they loved my audiobooks because what I did...

And it was funny because the producers hated it. And they would try and cut it out. I just said, no, I'm not. I wouldn't let them. As I'd be reading my stories, I would laugh sometimes when things would happen that I remember. Yeah. And I would put in these little slides, oh, man, I remember this. This was so bad. And then I would read the text. People loved that. Of course they did. They loved that. Of course they did. Bro, more than any. That actually shocked me. I didn't know that was going to happen.

Yeah. So by the time I got to my third and fourth audio book, then I was fully on board with doing that and being that way. You're 100% right. The author should read their own audio book if at all possible. Did you listen to David Goggins audio book?

Like he's obviously a brilliant dude, but like he reads slowly and kind of like stilted. Like, you know, like the kid that you make fun of in class would read. Yeah. Like if you're an asshole. Yeah. Right. He reads like that. And so he didn't want to read the audio book. Right. Like it's going to make him sound bad. I get it. I'm with you. He's like, all right, well, what if we get my writer? Like the guy who did the all the line work with him, Josh. What if we get him to read?

the chapter. And then he interviews me at the end of each chapter. And I honestly, at first, I like, man, I don't think this is going to work. And I gave him a couple of reasons why it wasn't going to work. And he had really good answers. I'm like, okay, let's try it. You know what? Let's try it. And then we eventually settled on a five to 10 minute interview at the end of each chapter. Bro, it worked so good. One of the, to me, the big faux pas that make memoirs not work is when you try and

I'm going to tell my life story, but I'm also going to tell people what to do. Right? I'm going to teach lessons. No, no, no, no. Your memoir is your story. And you can talk about your lessons and what you learned all you want. But don't point the finger outwards at the audience and tell them what to. Because that's just, not only emotionally is that you distracting yourself from yourself, but also it's very disconcerting to the audience. And David wanted to have lessons in his book. And we got him, he understood pretty quickly that no, he put the lesson, tell your story.

then put the lesson at the end as a separate section and so he combined the lesson part of the audiobook with the interview and bro it was so good it was i've heard that from everybody i'm telling you if you got a drive coming up yep buy that audiobook listen audiobook even if you've already read the book you will take a lot from that audiobook that you did not get in the memoir because it's not it's not in there it is genuinely a different piece of art and it's way better

Well, one of the things that to tie these threads together, we talked about your title, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. We talked about the audio book. You're kind of not supposed to do that when you were talking there, did it anyway.

And what shows up when it comes to voice, when it comes to writing, is there's all these conventions that people think that good writing means surrendering to. Yeah. Rules. What nonsense. What nonsense. The things that we're saying created connection that people just loved and adored. It just came from saying, you know what? This is right for me. This is right for my voice. And once again, this feels particularly true for memoir writing. So in our program, what we tell people is there's one rule for memoir. There is one rule.

do what works for you. Even if we're all trying to get to the peak of the same memoir mountain, there are an infinite number of paths up there. You can follow someone else's path. It might work really well for you. You can carve your own path. You can half and half, whatever. As long as it gets you to the top, it's a valid path. When you're working with writers and they come to you, they say, Tucker, now I got to actually get this thing out and I don't have a writing habit. What do you tell them?

My program is only memoir and it's only for people who want to tell the truth of their stories, not for the legacy people. Right. Yep. And we kind of, we help them understand which one they are. And if they're a legacy person, we push them to scribe or somewhere else. And if they want to write their memoir, they usually are already on board with creating a writing habit because we don't do ghostwriting either. I don't do any ghostwriting. Like if you want me to go, well, that's not true. If some big person wanted to come in and pay me a million or $2 million to ghostwrite their memoir and they wanted to sell the truth, I probably,

I may, may not take, depending on who they are, if I think it's going to be enjoyable and I think they're really sincere, then I'll probably take the gig. But we're not, like I'm not trying, I'm not soliciting ghostwriting gigs, right? Like I want people who want to write it themselves. They want to tell their story. They want to tell it honestly and they want to write it. Once they're already in that headspace, I don't have to convince them to have a writing habit, right? So then it's just teaching them how to create a writing habit. And so really what I do,

Man, I make it, we get super granular. I'll tell you exactly how we teach it. First week, you know, Hey, listen, you know, you gotta have a right habit. Yeah. Okay, cool. So then it's like, what days and times do you want to write? And like literally, and then we go through why morning tends to be advantageous. If you can make it work, how long in your day should you carve out? We recommend for most people an hour to two hours, not more than three, because even if you have the time, um,

it's almost impossible to be productively creative beyond three hours. You can't do it. No, right. Maybe one day, like I haven't written a while. Of course, but there's no way you can do it every day. Sit down at a table for four hours and write for four straight hours every day. Man, Isaac, people are like, what about Isaac Asimov? It's like, bro,

there's a reason he dies like that. Stop it. You know, come on. When I was doing this for a living and nothing else, I was, I blocked out four hours and I was lucky if I got two and a half in those four. Totally. Most people have enough shame and enough betrayal and enough self-condemnation

They don't need any more coming from me. Right. We like to take Emily and I both a very, uh, there's, there are, there's a firmness here, but it is couched in caring, compassion, empathy, understanding. This is a hard process. You don't need to make it harder.

Let's make it as easy and enjoyable as possible. Well, I don't want to go the other way too. Oh yeah, everything's fine. Everything's good. You can do anything you want. Like, yeah, I'm not that touchy feely either. Like, yeah, there's some boundaries and there's some, you know, some things you need to do, but inside of that, let's make it as easy and fun. So what do you tell people when they just can't sit down to write? They're just not doing it. Oh,

I just want to do this. David, no bullshit. On my memoir. Part of why I started my memoir coaching company, this is the God's honest truth. I was, after I sold Scribe, got to sell my ranch to my family. Everything is good.

I'm like, all right, I need to write. It's time for me to write my, not need to. It's time for me to write my next memo. Everyone, like, you know, how did you go from beer and hell Tucker max? This guy, I like, it's a crazy story. There's a lot there. Uh, I want to write it. It's time to write it. I sat down to write it. I wasn't getting anything done. And I know all the tricks. I know all the techniques, literally all of them. I went through the entire bevy. One of the last ones at the bottom is a forced accountability.

Right. So where you make a public commitment or you do something with a group, that kind of forced accountability. Right. Cause it's just a high effort thing. Right. And so that's, it's at the bottom of my personal list of the tricks I use to get myself going if I feel stuck. And, um,

So I'm like, all right, I'm going to teach people memoir and I'm going to commit to them that I'm going to write my memoir with them. So that's what's very different like with my group is I'm not just their coach and mentor. I'm writing my memoir with them and they get to see my rough drafts. Like not just like my finished stuff, which when it started off, I had, you know, I don't know, 10,000 words booked. I'm like, okay, I'll dole this out the first couple of weeks. And so I don't have a lot of pressure. I'm like, you know, I'll be able to stay ahead of it.

Didn't work that way, dude. I got behind, man. And so then what ended up happening, like by about the third month, I had to start showing them my really raw, like vomit draft stuff.

that was just garbage, dumpster fire, which all rough drafts always have a level of rawness to them. But these were like my really, really rough stuff, right? That I hadn't even, like, I wasn't that embarrassed or ashamed because, you know, they all love me. They're all like, we all work, we all know each other, you know, once they join the group and stuff. So they were a great crew. But I was just like, ugh.

man, I can't believe I have to show this to people. Like I wouldn't even show this to my wife. It's just not ready. Right. But it's what I have.

It ended up being one of the best parts of the program. And now I've actually solidified some of those drafts and make it part of what people read when they onboard. Because I didn't, of course, as soon as it happened, I was like, oh, but I just didn't think about it ahead of time. So many of these writers think that like the fancy published writers like you or me or whoever, like we just shit out gold.

Right. Trust me, that is not the case. Of course not. But we tell them this. They don't believe us. Yeah. They don't believe us, dude. They don't believe, they look at my books and they read them and they see how polished they are. They read David Goggins or they read whatever. And they're like, this is so good. I could never do this. And anyone who did this could never be where I am. Even if they don't,

tell you that that is their belief and then they saw my truly and these are real like I wasn't yeah like I didn't have anything else to show them and I committed I was just so I had to show them my shitty stuff bro they were blown down of course yeah like one of the dudes who's in England I forget he goes mate this is right shit

Because this is shite. And I'm like, yeah, dude, I know. Like, did you really need? He goes, no, no, I'm not criticizing. He goes, I didn't believe you when you told me. I didn't believe you. And now I can see it. He was so energized and excited. He goes, oh, I can get where I'm going. I can do it. I believe it now because what you just wrote looks like what I write. I'll have broken sentences and paragraphs and like,

I will wake up in panics. And even last week, I was in New York and I had something due Friday and I just woke up. I went through a walk in Central Park and then I really didn't want to work on it. So I got myself a coffee and then I got myself another coffee and then I got myself an Ambi on water because they're like, oh, if I could have a fancy water, then I would be able to write. Yeah.

Like, just like I couldn't even do Dasani. I needed Evian. So I kind of go and then I went to the flagship Apple store and I got some headphones because I was like, okay, I'm going to talk this one out. Like I literally need to buy headphones so that I could properly do this. I walk at Central Park. I do it. I then like, I kid you not, sleep for two hours to keep procrastinating. Then I end up writing it like that night after dinner with a friend, shipping it a day late and then.

The whole thing was an absolute disaster. I really didn't want to do it. And that's what it is. It's like this, that particular is a letter, is a final sales letter for Rite of Passage. And I was just so reluctant to do it. Well, I started the accountability group and then I got stuck. So to come all the way back to your original question, what do you do when you're stuck, right? And it got to the point where I couldn't even write a bad draft. Like I was genuinely like my body, I'm in touch with myself enough to know now

My body's inbounded. Like, the next step is you're going to get sick. Oh, wow. Like, I'm going to make you sick so you can't get out of bed. So you wake the fuck up. Yep. And so I did the last...

sort of pull in case of a break glass in case of emergency thing and i told them and i was real honest like guys i need to take a break not from the group i'm going to be here teaching you guys mentoring my capacity as a coach is easy i love it it's fun that doesn't change i need to take a three month break from writing and so you aren't going to get drafts from me for three months

And I'm sorry. I know, like, I promised you'd see all my drafts. So it's not like I'm holding it back. I'm not going to write. If I write anything, I'll show it to you immediately. I just don't have, I need to give this to myself. They were, of course, I'm like, I'll give you guys refunds. If you feel like this is like a betrayal, like, no, no, they're like, it was amazing. And it was great. And then Emily is my partner in the business. I told some story on one of our support calls about my kid. And she's like,

You can't just write that down. Yeah. I was like, all right, fine. So I wrote that out. It was a good story and everyone loved it. And now I'm slowly coming back and I'm like, you guys just need to give me permission to let, let me come to this as I, as I'm able, instead of having to rush back. Like, yeah, of course. And, um, and then it's ended up being a great teacher for them because what part of our program is once you join the program,

uh yeah you are in it until you're done with your memoir and i don't care how long it takes because that's the thing is like i can't say hey listen go deep be emotional put your whole story as much as you can on the page and then be like oh you got six months to fear your emotions david like that's bullshit right it doesn't you can't you can't have it that way if it's like a non-fiction book and you're writing a sales page yeah i could be like let's go dude you're on the clock right not emotions not fair not how it works

And so, um, what a lot of them, I think we're pushing themselves and pressuring themselves. They've seen me take a break. They got to a hard place. They took a break. What? They're two weeks. Then they came back. They feel refreshed. They realize this is not a rush. There's no emergency. You get to take the time you need. Yeah. Right. And some people are like, bro, they're churning out tons of stuff. They're just, they're at that space. Right. I have those spaces too, where I'm 3000 words a day. Yep. Effortless. Um,

And I think honestly, the realization I had last week was that was the thing. It was man, I was trying to I was trying to create a result. I was writing for legacy without realizing it. I wasn't sitting down and writing true sentences. And it was just the last week I've sat down and started writing. What is a true sentence?

That's funny. It kind of comes back around what you talked about. I've been going back to my journal, my 07 journal and then my 14 journal. I'm not actually ready to write about the stuff in 07, like the stuff where I vomited out the deepest wounds. Even though I've processed a lot of that stuff in my life, I think editing that is going to be another level of processing that I just wasn't ready. I'm not ready for today. But today I can write about like when I started talk therapy with my psychoanalyst in like 13 or 14.

Like I started, that's when I started my journal was when I was working with her and long before psychedelic medicine, whatever. And now I've started writing dialogue. It's just, I'm not even worried if it's going to go in the book, whatever. It's like, what were the, the, uh, the sessions that I remember the most that were impactful?

like the time that like she broke my fucking brain about like uh if i wanted a basically like i was saying i wanted a girlfriend and then a wife but i everything in my life indicated that all i really wanted to do was hook up and she asked me a bunch of questions that got me there and i was like and i melted so i just wrote that the dialogue that i remember that interaction right i don't know where it's gonna go yeah i'm not sure it'll be in the book but i don't know and then stuff like that

So when I'm writing about emotions, what are some of the things that I can focus on so that it doesn't feel like a trauma dump, but it also feels real? Yeah. Well, like we said before, if you start with a trauma dump, it's okay. Like your first draft is for you, right? Your vomit draft is for you. It's for no one else, right? So that's actually one of the problems. If we're talking about writing emotions specifically, it's

Is that I face. And a lot of other. Even new writers. New writers and experienced writers. Is they try to get it out edited. Almost. Like it needs to come out good. It's why we teach the vomit draft method. Especially for emotional writing. You've got to give yourself permission. To give. To put out sentence fragments. And nonsense. And garbage. That's a lot of times what it feels like inside of you. Right? This is why. Like what we were just talking about. With the.

The people in my program would see my true vomit draft messes and be like, oh, wow, that's just like mine. And so that's a totally valid thing. Now, that being said, what are some other techniques you can use to help you identify those emotions and describe them? Because emotions are inherently non-physical, non-tangible things. You're describing the impacts of them, not the thing. So it makes it hard.

So we like to start with the most teaching this, the most fundamental thing. Like literally it colors, shapes, feelings in the body. Like my hands went numb. My legs were jittering.

I felt butterflies in the stomach. I felt nauseous. Hands are sweaty. Right. Sweaty hands. Like what texture, right? What a lot of people call great writing is actually someone who's channeling a trauma response effectively. So like...

if I were to, let's say I was super nervous in this interview and I were to write about it, I would say, you know, I rubbed my sweaty hands on the, what do you call it? Like the felt, whatever the name for this sort of fabric is, there's a name for it. Yeah. This sort of felt veneer. Uh,

And it made me think about, you know, like the manufacturing process of all of it. Well, I mean, I go down rabbit hole, but the point is I'm describing these little... Yeah, yeah. This boucle. Yeah, boucle. Is that what it's called? Yeah. How the hell do you know? That's amazing. Because I have... Well, that's sort of like a boucle couch. These are boucle chairs. I have a boucle couch at home. I love this texture. Okay. That's amazing that you knew the name of that. A lot... That's...

a lot of people think great writing is knowing the names of something it can be if you're good at that and that's your thing right i don't know the names of anything i'm still a good writer it's just like well the way i would explain it is this is the kind of couch that a cat's claws would really get their hands into that's so good it feels like a couch that a cat had already scratched up yeah yeah but that's actually the way it came it's called boucle whatever and then i can i'm when

When someone's feeling a high intensity emotion, usually what they, it's called tunneling, right? Or portholing. They get super into the, like everything becomes hyper aware, right? I feel the fabric. I feel my, my, the oils and sweat on my skin going into the fabric. Right. Like whatever. What that does is anchor you in the experience and in the, then you can start thinking, okay, as I'm rubbing this,

and picking at it like my cat would do what is the like uh you know how's my body i'm tense my muscle my upper arms are tense so you know this that i can feel me constricting my hamstrings holding me in the chair right things like uh like uh what your body's doing what what is your brain thinking about right which is one of those things what do you mean what am i thinking about

It is a super normal thing in high intensity situations to have either flashbacks, weird references, weird thoughts, you know, like whatever. Put those on the page. Right. So literally go through what are you seeing in the room?

You know, like I can describe the plants, the greenness of it. I didn't realize it was fake until halfway in the interview, but I wasn't looking at it. But the point, you know, like all those sorts of things, that's a way to, what you're trying to do is center in the experience. And here's the key thing. It's just a bunch of very simple observations. Like the cat thing actually comes from like my four-year-old self. There's no fancy words there. It's just like, this is the kind of chair that it kind of looks like the cat ripped it up.

No, right. But see, what people would say, some people I think would say is, I never would have thought of that. You didn't make that reference. It doesn't need to go in your book. You did though, right? So all you're doing is bringing up and making explicit the references you're making in your mind, the connections in your mind. I would think about something else. Right. I can, that's also good writing. It's not about how do I sound fancy?

What's going on in my experience? So many people who try to be good writers, as I'm sure you know, or even in their memoir, they think they're supposed to be good writers. So they try to sound fancy instead of just sounding like themselves and being honest about what they're thinking and feeling. Every great story is three second increments described completely back to back. That's all a story is. Final question. One of the things I found very interesting as writers

as I was prepping for this, is this concept that after somebody picks up your memoir, you have to keep selling them. And that's the job of an introduction. It's not to just explain what the entire book is. It's actually to keep pitching them to, they've already bought the book with their money. Now they got to do it with their time. And that's what you're trying to get people to do.

I really hammer that idea home with nonfiction books for sure. Like if you were to write a book, how to write a book or how to write, or we're working, Emily and I on the book, tell your story, how to write a memoir, you know, like a, we're going to hammer that. Like it's a constant sale to get them without being salesy, right? Yep. Memoir, I think you do the same thing, but the way you do it's way easier.

I think all you have to do is keep telling the truth. You know, great movies will start right in the middle of a super intense scene, like someone's holding a gun to their head. Casino Royale is exactly like that. It just starts. I remember being in the movie theater, like holding the chair that's just riveting right at the beginning. They're like running on beams 300 feet above the sky. You're like, whoa, here we go. Start right in the middle of the action. It doesn't have to be the most intense action, but very intense action.

And then start there. Tell that story, not to completion, just like sort of like you, like Casino Royals, great example. Tell it to like, you get this still, you may have wondered how I got here. Like that kind of, without literally doing that, you tell, and then you just kind of like, okay, this is part of my story. This is whatever. I'm going to tell you the whole story now. And then you generally, this is almost like,

If so, you would ask me what's the one memoir structure that I can use forever that will always work. This is it. Start you. Don't start. I was born a young boy on a ranch. No, no, no. I'll start this boy. Start, start with a very intense scene. Maybe even like the culmination if you want. Start in that scene. Start in the intense moments. Yep. Like, bro, I will tell you, you can actually pull this up right now if you want and read it.

The book that does this the best I've ever seen this, ever seen it, is called Redeployment by Phil Clay. We shit dogs? We shot dogs. Not shit them. We shot dogs, not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I'm a dog person, so I thought about that a lot. Are you not in on this book now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally...

Like, that is one of the greatest... I mean, he talks about the specifics of shooting the dog. First time was instant. Yeah, you didn't think about it. The thinking comes later when they give you the time. Dude, like, I'm not exaggerating. I remember someone sent me an excerpt from that

And it was, I had a meeting, like I read that and I finished the look inside function. Yeah. And I bought the book. I canceled my meeting and I kept going. You can't have a book that's constantly at that height of emotional impact, but you've got to go up and down in cycles. That's just what stories do, right? Right. But the book, it keeps going. Like it keeps going like that. It's super, super engaging. The first chapter, it kind of falls off a little bit towards the end.

But I read the whole book. I read the whole book because I was so gripped by that intro and by that first story. You know? Well, so Eric Jorgensen is now the CEO of Scribe, a company that you founded. And I was at his lake house.

And he walks in, he goes, David, I got a book for you. You got to read. And I go, what's it called? He goes, Chanterelle. And I go, okay, tell me about it. He goes like, it's a thousand pages. And I go, absolutely not. And he goes, I'm just going to read you the first sentence. Here it is. It took me a long time and most of the world to know what I know about love and fate and the choices we make. But the heart of it came to me in an instant when I was chained to a wall and being tortured.

Damn. Damn. I know. Bro, what? I read Shantaram and the follow-up book because of that. I'm with you. He's a great writer. I think he's totally fucked up. I think he is completely and mostly dissociated. And there were 50 times, 100 times in his two books where I wanted to shake that motherfucker and be like, dude. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Feel your emotions. Deal with your trauma. Feel your emotions. But an amazing writer, an amazing storyteller. I read all of both books. Some people have debated whether any of those are true or not. I take them as memoirs. I don't really care that much about the truth of it. They were so honest and so deep. And even though I... Greg...

Gregory David Robert. It frustrated me so much, but I didn't get mad at him. I still loved him. I still kept reading because he was honest. Even if it's most fucked up, he told the truth. At least it felt like the truth. I don't know him. I've never met him. I don't know any of the facts of his life. That book read and felt like the truth at all moments. At all moments.

That 2,500 pages or whatever both books are, you read them because you always feel like you're getting the truth and the truth is always compelling. That is how you sell someone constantly to finish your memoirs. You just keep telling them the truth. No one's going to stop. Yeah. Like why? You don't ever stop listening to, it's like a great conversation like this. I'm telling them my truth. You're telling your truth. It could literally, except for the demands of our body and the outside world, go on forever.

There we go. Cut. That was fun, man. Yeah, that was great. Good stuff.