Tucker Max Interview: This Simple Honesty System Made Me a Bestselling Author

All right, so I'm well aware of my reputation. Among other things, I'm kind of known as the guy who will tell anyone to fuck off. Right? And that works. It's great. When you're writing books about being an immature asshole. Telling people to fuck off is a fantastic skill to have, but now it's not maybe necessarily the best thing to have when you're running a business, when you have a family, when you're trying to. When your life doesn't revolve around drinking and hooking up and being an asshole, then that's not a skill that you need. But that's not the only part of my reputation I think that's relevant. I also have a reputation for being the guy who will say what he wants. I'll basically say whatever's on my mind. I'll tell the truth. I'll say the thing that everyone is thinking but won't say. And that was obviously very helpful for writing books, too. But it's been very helpful in my life. In fact, I would tell you I'm probably not all that talented. I'm definitely not the most talented person in this room. But I think I've succeeded because of that. Because I'll say the things that I think and that I feel.

In the 2013 blockbuster movie the Wolf of Wall street, Fuck was used 569 times, only to be beaten out by the next year by the movie Swearnet, which used fuck 935 times. Your next speaker, Tucker Max, will not use the word fuck that many times, but he will most likely use the word fuck quite a bit. If that word is offensive to you, well, I don't give a shit. Imagine if Joel Weldon would have said that. Okay, I don't want to offend anyone, and neither does Tucker. Having the freedom to say what you want to say and use the words that you want to use, with some considerations, is what he'll be talking about. Tucker's law degree from prestigious Duke University Law School proves he's one smart dude. Plus, as the founder and chairman of Book in a Box, a company that turns your ideas into a book, proves he's a great businessman, too. Tucker's own books have sold over 3 million copies, and he's helped many people in this room write and market books. As a matter of fact, I think other than Malcolm Gladwell, he's the only author to have three New York Times best sellers on at the same time. Get ready, you've been warned. Here comes with his message titled the Freedom to say what yout want, my friend Tucker. Max.

Thanks, brother. Thank you. I failed this time. I promise you before I die, I will get Joel Weldon to say a curse word on stage. All right? So I'm well aware of my reputation. Among other things, I'm kind of known as the guy who will tell anyone to fuck off, right? And that works. It's great. When you're writing books about being an immature asshole. Telling people to fuck off is a fantastic skill to have, but now it's not maybe necessarily the best thing to have when you're running a business, when you have a family, when you're trying to. When your life doesn't revolve around drinking and hooking up and being an asshole, then that's not, you know, that's not a skill that you need. But that's not the only part of my reputation I think that's relevant. I also have a reputation for being the guy who will say what he wants. I'll basically say whatever's on my mind. I'll tell the truth. I'll say the thing that everyone is thinking but won't say. And that was obviously very helpful for writing books, too. But it's been very helpful in my life. In fact, I would tell you I'm probably not all that talented. I'm definitely not the most talented person in this room. But I think I've succeeded because of that. Because I'll say the things that I think and that I feel. And that's what this speech is about. It's about how to do that. How can you say the things that you want to say, but you're not saying? Now, this obviously presupposes a question. Is there something you want to say that you're not saying? So I want you to think about that for a second. Is there something you want to say to someone that you have not said? I mean, there's a lot of things, right? Maybe you want to tell me I have bad breath or I dress poorly. Maybe you want to, you know, like, there's more important things, too. You want to say things like, I want a divorce. I don't want to do business with you anymore. I want to fire you as a client. Whatever it is, whatever it is. I want you to think in your head, is there something I want to say that I haven't said? Think about what it is and hold it there. We're going to come back to that. Now, I'll be the first to tell you saying whatever the fuck you want has consequences, among other things. I've been sued twice for the things that I've said or written, and that sucked. Being sued is expensive. It's emotionally draining, it's aggravating, it's time consuming. I would not wish it on my worst enemy. Except maybe those fucking assholes who sued me. Fuck them, right? But there are also good things that come good consequences as well. Aside from my success with writing and storytelling, I think I owe the things that are most meaningful in my life to being willing to be honest and say the things I want. My family and my son, my wife. I mean, we're. Joe's going to be vulnerable on stage, so I'll do it too. I spent four years in psychoanalysis going four times a week to kind of deal with my issues and get to the point where I knew what I wanted to say clearly and then said it to the people I needed to say it to. And I would not be where I am without doing that. Now, I'm not saying, if you want to say what you want, that you need to go into therapy. I. I'm probably more fucked up than most of you, except maybe Mike Koenigs. But. No, I'm kidding. Is Mike here? Yeah. Fuck him then, if he's not gonna come to my speech. He is the most fucked up of all of us. Are you here? There you go. I love you, Mike.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I wanna let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

The point of this is that for my whole life, people have been asking me, how the fuck do you do this? How do you just say what you want? How do you just tell the truth? And I've never really had an answer. I've never really known what to say. So when someone asks me this, like, how are you so honest? How do you say these things? And I'm like, I don't know. What's your fucking problem? Just say it. How hard can that be? Right? That's a stupid advice that doesn't help anyone. And then I realized what I was missing. I was at lunch with a friend of mine, you guys probably know him, Simon Sinek. He starts with Y. The Ted, right? So Simon's a great dude. And we were at lunch and we were ordering and he was anxious and I thought Maybe he's like me. He's a foodie, and he kind of wants to order the best dish. That's not what was going on at all. He told me he was anxious because I'm dead serious. He was nervous about what the waiter would think of his order. And I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? How does that even come? This shit blew my mind, that this could even be a thought in someone's head. I mean, the waiter's a nice person, but what the fuck are you talking about? And then it all hit me like that, what I was missing. It's about approval. People don't say what they want to say because they want approval more than they want results. They think if they say what they're thinking, people won't like them. They'll think less of them. They'll reject them. They'll in some way disconnect from them. That makes sense. Now, this might be obvious to all of you, but I'm kind of a narcissistic asshole. So this was a revelation for me. And it helped me unpack what I was doing naturally and unconsciously, that I think most people don't do. And so I kind of figured out what it was. And it's. If you want to say what you want, it's basically three steps. It's very simple. It's not easy to do, but it's simple. The first question, you ask yourself three questions. Number one is, what do I want to say? And it may seem, like, obvious, right? But most people. When you have an emotional response to something, most people, especially a stressful one, you bury it. You don't actually bring it up and articulate it. So the first thing you need to do is know what do you want to say? Clearly. The second thing you need to do is understand what are the worst possible consequences? Not what are all the consequences. What are the worst one or two, the worst things that could happen? And then the third question you need to ask yourself is, can I accept those consequences? If the answer is yes, you say it. If the answer is no, that's okay. Then you don't say it and you just let it go. I'll give you some examples. In my life on the flight here, I had probably the same fight that a lot of you have had. I'm sitting in my seat and I'm on the phone with my wife and son and saying goodbye. I love them, whatever. Because God forbid, the plane crashes the last time I talked to them, and the fucking jet bridge pulls 1 inch off the plane and the godd fucking waitress or flight attendant is up my ass about getting off the fucking phone. And of course I was pissed off. What did I want to say? Fuck you, leave me alone. I'm telling my family I love them. What are the consequences of telling a flight attendant to fuck off? She will call the airport police. I will get pulled off the plane, I will get arrested. I will probably spend the night in. I'll definitely miss my flight. I'll probably spend the night in jail. Are those consequences worth it? Well, I'm on stage, right? So obviously I decided they weren't and I shut the fuck up and I turned my phone off and I just let it go. Obviously I let it go. Can't you tell I don't have any fucking emotions about this? But listen, the process also works for serious stuff too. In fact, this happened a few years ago. A friend of mine, who's gay but had not come out to his family, came to me and asked me for advice on how to do this. And at first I was a little bit confused about why a gay dude was coming to me for advice on how to be gay. I thought maybe he knew some shit I didn't know. But he said, no, no, no, Tucker. He said, don't worry, you dress far too poorly to ever be gay. That's not why I'm coming to you. He said, no, I'm coming to you because you're the guy who says whatever he wants. And I want to know how to do this. I want to know how to tell the truth. So I walked him through the process. I said, what do you want to say? He said, I want to tell my family I'm gay. I asked him what are the worst possible consequences. He said, my family could disown me, cut me off, and I could possibly never talk to them again. So I asked him, is that worth it? Can you accept those? And he started crying. And then I started crying. And then he made fun of me for crying. He actually called me, and I quote, a queenie fag, which I thought was pretty funny, pretty rich. And then. Anyway, so it took about an hour or two to work through this with him. And he decided it was worth it, that the price he had to pay for being true to himself was disapproval from someone else. He was willing to pay that price. Now, he could have gone the other way, but that's what he decided. And that's ultimately what this is about. It's not about telling people to fuck off, as fun as that can be. It's Much more about being who you are. So remember I told you guys earlier, I want you to think of the thing you want to say that you haven't said. If you're writing, take your pen right now and write it down. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands. I'm not going to ask you to say it out loud. I'm not going to call on anybody. It's not about that. I want you to write down what it is. Let's go through the process. What do you want to say that you haven't said? Write it down. What are the worst possible consequences? The worst? One or two. That's it. You can't have six worst things. There's one or two, and then three is very simple. Yes or no. It is a binary decision. It might take you six months to figure out whether it's yes or no, but it comes down to yes or no. Now, ultimately, that's what this is about, right? That's why you do this. That's what the freedom to say what you want to say is about. It's about being who you are. It's about your identity. If you can't say what you want to say, you can't be who you are. That's why I gave this speech, to give you the tools, if you don't have them yet, to do that. So now it's up to you. You gotta go say those things. And if you don't say them, then you can fuck off. Koenigse. No, thank you, guys. Thank you very much.

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