Tucker Max Grows Up: How To Own Your Emotional Truth, Redefine Your Story & Find Happiness

This week I'm going out on a limb. When the opportunity arose to sit down with Tucker Max, I admit to a little discomfort and trepidation. On the one, hand, I was genuinely honored he was interested in doing the show. On the other hand, I wasn't convinced he was the right fit for what I do. To be sure, Tucker Max is a high performing super-achiever. He is incredibly bright. He is insanely accomplished. And he has millions of fans the world over. Nominated to TIME magazine's “100 Most Influential List” of 2009, Tucker's first book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell* was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, spent 5 years on the list and ultimately sold over 2 million copies. He followed it up with two more books, both of which were also New York Times Bestsellers. Perhaps most impressive? Tucker is one of only three writers — along with Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis — to ever have three books on the New York Times Non-Fiction Bestseller List at the same time. Tucker Max is a publishing juggernaut. Irrespective of whatever opinion you may hold about the content of those books, you cannot deny that is a towering achievement. However, it's these very books, the fratire genre he singlehandedly birthed, and Tucker’s very public persona as America’s foremost bro — well known for his healthy ego, brash opinions and candid chronicling of his outlandish partying exploits – that gave me considered pause. Do I really want to talk to a guy who wrote a book called Assholes Finish First?* It’s just not my scene. It's not what I’m about. I don’t support those ideas. I'm not interested in that guy. It’s not me. But what is interesting, and why I ultimately decided to go forward with this interview, is that's not Tucker either. At least not any more. The Tucker Max of today is not the same hard drinking, hard partying, womanizing Tucker Max that made him famous and rich. In the wake of his staggering success, Tucker woke up to realize that all the material benefits he worked so hard to attain just weren't quite all they were cracked up to be. None of it made him happy. So what then? Ego must submit to introspection. Entering a period of honest self-reflection, Tucker took inventory of his life. He underwent psychological analysis. He asked himself the hard questions. What is truly important? In a word, Tucker Max grew up. Emerging from that former guy far more self-actualized, Tucker is telling a new story. Retired from fratire writing and the partying lifestyle, Tucker is now happily married (yes, monogamous) with Bishop, his newborn son. Today he is an angel investor and start up entrepreneur with a successful and exciting new venture designed to democratize publishing called Book In A Box. He co-founded and co-hosts The Mating Grounds, a popular podcast designed to help men have successful relationships with women. And September marks the release of his new book Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  All life really boils down to, for humans, are the relationships you have with the people you love and the things you do that matter to other people.

• 1:12Rich Roll?

  That's Tucker Maxx this week on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:26Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? It's Rich here, Rich Roll, your host, and thank you for tuning in. So, on this show, I have the great privilege of sitting down with some pretty amazing people, some of the best, most pioneering, paradigm-breaking minds and personalities across all categories, everything from health and wellness to fitness to medicine, nutrition, spirituality, psychology, and, in the case of today's guest, relationships, publishing, and technology. And the big idea behind all of this, really, is to leverage the insights provoked by these conversations and these thought leaders to really help you just live better.

• 2:08Rich Roll?

  To be better, to help all of us unlock and unleash our collective best, most authentic selves. So, thank you for subscribing to the show, I appreciate it. I appreciate you spreading the word on social media and of course, for always clicking through the Amazon banner ad at ritual.com for all your Amazon purchases. It's a great free way to support the mission and thank you so much to everybody who has made a habit of this, it's so awesome. If you have not yet done so, why don't you go ahead, bookmark the link from the banner ad on my site, why don't you? And make it easy, it's a win-win for all of us. Okay, listen up you guys. As you know, advertisers support the show and they keep it free for you. So...

• 2:53Rich Roll?

  Alright, so, where to begin? We're switching gears a little bit today, we're going to venture into some uncharted territory, uncharted waters, I think it's fair to say. We're going out on a bit of a limb, I suppose. So, look, when the opportunity arose to have Tucker Maxx on the show, I gotta admit, I got a little uncomfortable, I had a little bit of trepidation. On the one hand, I was super honored that he had an interest in doing the show, that's super cool. But at the same time, on the flip side of that, I also wasn't convinced that he was really the right fit for what I do, what I speak to and kind of what I stand for and what I'm trying to accomplish through this show.

• 3:36Rich Roll?

  I mean, look, certainly, he's super bright, he's incredibly accomplished, he's got millions of fans, I mean, this is a guy who was nominated to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential list in 2009. His first book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, was a number one New York Times bestseller. It spent five years on the list, it sold over 2 million copies. And his second and third books were also New York Times bestsellers. And he is only the third writer, along with Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis, to ever have three books on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller list at the same time. I mean, that's insane, just think about that for a minute. So, what am I saying?

• 4:18Rich Roll?

  Well, certainly, he is a publishing juggernaut and no matter what your opinion is of his books, you have to admit that that is pretty astonishing. But it's these books, combined with Tucker's public persona, you know, he's kind of known as America's foremost quote-unquote "bro", you know, a guy kind of known for his big ego, his braggadocio, his brash chronicling of his partying exploits. Well, all of that really gave me pause. I mean, do I really want to talk to a guy who wrote a book called Assholes Finish First? I mean, that's just not my scene, man. I mean, it doesn't really fit with what I'm about. I mean, frankly, I'm just not, I'm not interested in that guy. I don't support those ideas.

• 5:01Rich Roll?

  It's just, it's not me. But I'll tell you this. What is interesting, and why I ultimately decided to go forward with this interview, is that that's not Tucker either. At least not anymore. I'm not sure it ever really was. But Tucker Maxx of today really just isn't the same hard-drinking, hard-partying, womanizing Tucker Maxx that made him famous and made him, you know, really rich. And in the wake of his pretty staggering success, this is a guy who woke up to realize that all of the gifts of that success, all of those externalities, really just weren't making him happy. So what do you do when that happens?

• 5:43Rich Roll?

  What do you do when you've achieved your dream and you're in that destination point and it's not meeting your expectations? You're not feeling fulfilled? Well, ego has to submit to introspection, to self-reflection. And that's what Tucker did. He really started to do the internal work. He underwent analysis. In short, he grew up. And the Tucker that has emerged from that former guy is a much more self-actualized person. He got married, he has a baby, and he retired not from writing, but from the frat tire genre that he basically created and that whole lifestyle that surrounds all of that. So, here's the deal.

• 6:25Rich Roll?

  If this podcast is about anything, it's about transformation, our internal innate potential for transformation, how we navigate and overcome the obstacles that are placed in front of that transformative process. It's about owning your truth. It's about your story. It's about evolving, maturing, and letting go of the things that no longer serve you, moving past old habits and patterns. It's about growth. And I really wanted to explore that arc with Tucker. I wanted to know why he decided to change, what prompted it, and how he did it, how he looks back on that former guy, what he's interested in now, and really, you know, what can be mined from his experience that can be a benefit

• 7:10Rich Roll?

  for all of us. And I gotta say, in all honesty, I really ended up enjoying the conversation tremendously. We had a really good time. I think he came off really, really well. And look, Tucker's still Tucker. Don't get me wrong. I mean, this guy's sharp, he's ribald, he's very self-assured, he's highly opinionated, he's completely unapologetic, but he's also surprisingly reflective and introspective about his life and his background. So I'm excited to share it with you today. A quick note, there are a few instances of explicit language, I just wanted to point that out, and as well as a couple off-color stories. But hey, look, what are you gonna do? It's Tucker Max, right? I mean, it just comes

• 7:53Rich Roll?

  with the package, so it is what it is. All right, you guys. Are you ready? All right, here goes nothing.

• 8:07Rich Roll?

  What are you doing in LA?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  So I'm out here. We've got a meeting tonight. In fact, like, I'm leaving here whenever I leave, and we're going to... We're gonna pick up an investor for, not investor, an angel, I think our final, not angel, advisor, sorry dude, like I've been like talking all day long and now all my words are flowing together.

• 8:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you don't have, you shouldn't be raising money for.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  No, no, we're not raising at all, no, no, no, no, no. But we may raise eventually if we turn it into like a SaaS platform, if we can do this as software as a service and, and make it super cheap, like the reason to do a software as a service if we can do this really cheap for people. And so if we do that, we're probably gonna have to raise money. So we're bringing on some advisors now, not necessarily to raise, but just people to help us build the company, help us, connect us to a lot of people, whatever. So one of the main guys, one of the big, big angels in, in America is actually in LA. And he, he wants to, to, to come on as advisor first, cause he wants to put money in. But so, so we're meeting with him and his team today. And then we're gonna like talk about like advisor terms, stuff like that.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And then we're probably gonna write out, sort of like set up terms for a raise, but then it'll be up to us whether we ever trigger it, you know?

• 9:22Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  But you know, stuff like, does he get to lead the round? What, what allocation of the round, stuff like that. So that was the reason we came out to LA. And then, you know how it is, like LA is the type of city, like we, you can always take 10, 20 meetings. And so we stacked everything together and then it's like.

• 9:38Rich Roll?

  Just blow it out, before you go back home.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:41Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's actually hard to do more than like one or two meetings a day in LA. As opposed to like New York, New York, you can get so much done, but here it's like.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  You can do it in LA, I, I lived in LA for two years. You gotta like, well, see, look what I did, like you came, I had lunch right next door, right? And then, so I, the first meeting, we had two meetings in Beverly Hills, breakfast and then coffee. And then came here five minutes away. And then the angels in Venice Beach. So like, and it's like not till six, it's like way far away, right?

• 10:11Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  So we've got like the hour and a half traffic built in. If you do it, it's almost like logistics, like a UPS puzzle. Like if you put the meetings in the right sequence at the right times, you can totally take three, four, five in a day in LA. But if you just do it randomly, you're totally screwed.

• 10:27Rich Roll?

  But if you're going from like Burbank to Venice to Beverly Hills, like forget it, you're just.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  No way, yeah, it's not, it's not gonna do it, yeah.

• 10:34Rich Roll?

  Well, good, I'm glad we could make this work. And I wanna get into booking a box and all that kinda stuff, but. One of the, one of the ways I thought would be cool to kick it off is, you know, we're in Century City. We're staying in a hotel room.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:46Rich Roll?

  And it's impossible for me to, to be in Century City and not reflect back on my career as a lawyer. And like my law school experience, because I worked right next door in the Die Hard building. In the Nakatomi Plaza.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Nakatomi Plaza.

• 11:01Rich Roll?

  As an associate in a law firm for many years. So although I rarely come to Century City these days, like I used to come here every single day.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Is it like bad flashbacks and stuff?

• 11:10Rich Roll?

  A little bit. You know, like, uh, yeah, like a certain, every once in a while I'll hear a voice that sounds remarkably similar to like a partner that I used to work for. And I'll just, I'll have this like fight or flight like reaction.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 11:22Rich Roll?

  Like I have post-traumatic stress disorder.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 11:26Rich Roll?

  Experience. It's crazy that like this, this many years after it, I still like live with that. But you didn't, like, did you go and work in a law firm after law school?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I was straight up fired.

• 11:37Rich Roll?

  Oh, were you? Where, where?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Then Lincoln West. It's a big Silicon Valley firm.

• 11:40Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  I was, I, yeah, like I wasn't there long enough to get PTSD. I got fired after three weeks.

• 11:46Rich Roll?

  Three weeks?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Three weeks, dude.

• 11:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Cause I'd never seen anything about your career as a lawyer. I mean, I know you went to law school, but uh, what did you do to?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  So the, the stories in my first book, basically what happened was, uh, there were two things. So, uh, I was actually, here's what's funny. I didn't get fired. You're a lawyer. So you'll understand the difference. I didn't get fired from a job. I got fired as a summer associate.

• 12:09Rich Roll?

  That's really hard. Your only job is to have a good time and like go to ballgames and like go to happy hour.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  But there's a limit. Only type of good times you can have.

• 12:18Rich Roll?

  Like just not showing up?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  No, no. I showed up. I did, I did actually did great work. The partners that were working with me thought I was like, oh, this dude's really smart. He's great. There were two big problems. Um, one was one of the senior female partners, not associates, partners in the firm propositioned me, right? And like, cause I was like the fun drunk, uh, like party summer, right? And there was like this one, uh, partner, female partner who was a total cougar and she was all over me. And I, I, to this day, I don't know why I turned her down and I have no idea why, because I've slept with women who are far uglier than her and far older. And I don't know what I was thinking, especially cause I was like 25 at the time, right?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  So it was basically just a big walking like penis. And, um, I, I turned her down and then here's what, here's the best part. I turned her down and then I told everyone in the firm about it.

• 13:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that was not a smart political move.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Dude, I did the little worst thing. I could have slept with her and then I was bulletproof. Or I could have turned her down and shut up, right? But instead, I did the worst possible.

• 13:21Rich Roll?

  Option three, option C.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Option three, get fired.

• 13:24Rich Roll?

  So then they just, how did that go?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  That went down on like a, like a Monday or Tuesday night. The next weekend, we went to um, this winery for like the, the firm retreat. And they, they brought the summers, obviously. And I got hammered at this thing. And uh, there was like a charity auction for like the firm. And it was things like, you know, the managing partner makes you dinner or whatever. And I went up on stage and I took the mic from the auctioneer. Cause I was like trying to bid on this one thing. And, and someone was outbidding me, so I took the mic from the auctioneer. I started cursing at them and like making them stop bidding. It was like, it was one of those things where it was started off really funny and then it got like unfunny.

• 14:01Rich Roll?

  Really ugly quickly.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  And so.

• 14:03Rich Roll?

  Well, you didn't give them much choice.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  No, I didn't.

• 14:06Rich Roll?

  But you were still in law school then, right? So, so after you graduated though, the.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  No, no, they fired me. And then here's what's crazy, I wrote an email. I got fired the next Wednesday. That Monday, I wrote an email about it to my friends, sent it to them. I get fired. Of course, my friends are dicks. So they, they forward the email to all their friends at all the different uh, law firms they're summering at, right? And so it blows up. It, I mean, this is, you know, 2000. This is email, even though MySpace doesn't exist, email's fully like in existence. And the email goes everywhere and you know how small law firms are, like in the legal community. So uh, I can't even interview when I get back to Duke. Like I'm totally, I'm the dude who got fired after three weeks for getting drunk.

• 14:48Rich Roll?

  Job prospects are over for you before you even graduated. So then when you graduated, what, what were you thinking you were gonna do?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Um, I went to work for my dad. He owns uh, restaurants in South Florida.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And then my dad fired me.

• 15:02Rich Roll?

  Oh yeah, I think I've heard that story. Well, one of the things that you wrote that really spoke to me was that article. Uh, I think it was originally in Huffington Post about why you shouldn't go to law school. Cause I've often thought like. You know, I'd really like to put together like a keynote and just travel to all the law schools and just break down exactly what the practice of law.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Do it undergrad, catch them before they go.

• 15:25Rich Roll?

  And, and explain to them that, you know, just to disabuse them of this myth or, and I think the thing is, and one of the things you pointed out in that article is, you, you sort of dispel all these ideas about what the practice of law, you know, what you kind of conjure it up to be in your mind versus what it really is, and all the reasons why you can kind of, you know, trick yourself into thinking it's a good idea when maybe it's not. And then you sort of say, I knew all this stuff and I still went and I made this mistake and I'm trying to help you, you know, from making the mistake that I did. And I knew all those things too and I made it. And I think there's something, I don't know if it's inherent to the law student or in general or just young people, but you think that your experience is going to be different.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 16:07Rich Roll?

  You know all that stuff and you're like, but that's not going to be me.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I said that. I'm like, well, I'm better than all those people.

• 16:11Rich Roll?

  And you go on these, you get these cushy jobs at these law firms as a summer associate where they pay you really well and they don't overwork you and they entertain you and wine and dine you and you do all this fun stuff and then you're like, ah, it's not so bad.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:24Rich Roll?

  You know, I'll do this.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  It's not the worst.

• 16:26Rich Roll?

  I'm just gonna pay off my law school loans and I'll go do what I'm gonna do.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Uh huh. That's how they suck you in, like drug dealers.

• 16:30Rich Roll?

  And then you get sucked in and then you're there and you've got a pile of debt and you're miserable and to compensate for being miserable, you start spending your money, right? You start leasing a car maybe you can't afford, you get an apartment that's a little bit above your pay grade and then you're stuck, man.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Handcuffs.

• 16:50Rich Roll?

  Cause that just, that just escalates.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the golden handcuffs.

• 16:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I've seen it so many times with so many people and then they just resign their life to it and they say, well, maybe next time.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And they try and rationalize it and all that sort of stuff.

• 16:59Rich Roll?

  A lot of rationalizations. And then when you leave, like I remember when I finally was like, I just can't, I mean, I was so burned out. That I can remember sitting at my desk and all I had to do was like type a confirming letter, like the deposition will be at this place at this time. And I was like, I can't do it. I could not make my fingers type. And I was like, done. And, and when I decided to leave, the reaction of the other associates is pretty interesting because they're not necessarily so supportive. Because if you can break free, that's very threatening.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  It's a mirror that shines on their inability.

• 17:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And so that's frightening for them. Because if somebody can do it, that means they can too. And, and there's a lot of fear that comes up with that.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  And then they have to face the fact that they don't.

• 17:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  They can and they don't. Because you did it. And if they don't, they have to face the fact that they're being cowards, or they're whatever, whatever their problem is.

• 17:51Rich Roll?

  And I mean, it's not even, it's almost not even fair to say cowardice, because if, if, I think a lot of people probably enter into that world in a way that's probably similar to the way that I did, in the sense that my whole life was premised upon, you know, academic achievement, and like, you know, that sort of myth of the American dream that you're chasing, and sort of social acceptability, and security, and all these sorts of things, right? So you're not really, I never was thought to really think critically or out of the box about my life. And this just seemed like a good thing to do. And not because I had any kind of inherent passion for it, but just because it's respectable, right? And so when you're faced with the prospect of leaving, that's like, that was the scariest thing I ever did in my life, to this day, like that day. Because when I walked out,

• 18:35Rich Roll?

  I didn't have another job. But it wasn't like I knew what I was going to be doing. I had no idea.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  That takes courage, though.

• 18:40Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. But I think to say to somebody else, like, the fact that they don't do it is cowardly. I think it's just, that's, that's how they were raised. You know what I mean?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's frightening.

• 18:50Rich Roll?

  It's frightening, for sure. It is. Anyway, but I think that would be like, actually fun to go around and actually talk to kids, like, oh, this is what the real deal is.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Dude, I get emails all the time from people who are like, I either, one side or the other, I read it, I knew you were right, I still went, oh, God, why didn't I listen? And then all, all of them are right back, I say, quit, it's not too late. Then some do, some don't. And then others who are like, oh, my God, thank you so much, because of your piece, or partly because of it, I didn't go to law school. I'm so happy now. And I see people who did, and that would have been me.

• 19:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Like, I, like, I, I don't know how much you pay attention to. Law schools now, but you notice the last two years, I think applications have gone down like seventy percent or some crazy number.

• 19:34Rich Roll?

  That's pretty interesting.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  They've bottomed out, like they're they're below like even what they were in the like the early eighties, right before LA Law came on and they created the big spike.

• 19:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  They're back below that now. Law schools are going out of business. It's amazing.

• 19:47Rich Roll?

  Well, we're entering, you know, what James Altucher would call the choose yourself era. You know, it's an independent contractor world and and young people are not interested in that like sort of traditional career track. You know, the millennial mindset, the millennial psyche is, you know, I want to chase my passion and that gets branded and sort of unfairly characterized as selfish or self-seeking, I think.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Not in the least.

• 20:09Rich Roll?

  I think there's something really golden and beautiful about that.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 20:12Rich Roll?

  To the extent that somebody can find a way to support themselves, even if it's project to project by doing something that they enjoy, like that's something to celebrate.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 20:20Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? And in my case, like it was even worse than that because I was a paralegal in New York City for SCAD and ARPS for two years before I went to law school.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Wow, that's the belly of the beast.

• 20:29Rich Roll?

  Went, and this was like nineteen eighty, eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  That's the real belly of the beast.

• 20:35Rich Roll?

  Big time M and A era and all that kind of stuff. And it was insane when I was there. And I was the world's worst paralegal because all I wanted to do is party. And I was making no money. And so I hung out with these guys that we called ourselves like the kings of the low budget social scene. So we always knew where the free beer was and we'd get free food and because we had, we literally like had to make an awesome night out of like ten bucks. That's all we could afford, you know?

• 21:00Rich Roll?

  And and the day to day grind of being in that environment and watching those lawyers like suffer, you know, was horrible. And I was terrible at it and I didn't care. And I still went to law school. That's how deeply ingrained that programming was, you know what I mean?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  You know what's funny? I know a lot of paralegals say that.

• 21:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Like you're not alone. It's not like, oh, what what a crazy person. A ton of people in law school are paralegals. It's almost like, um, it's almost, it's almost like, I think it's the idea that like, if I, fuck it, if I'm gonna take the abuse, I might as well get paid, like unconsciously, you know? Like, I I don't know why, but yeah, it you would think that would be an like an antidote, but it acts almost like as an inoculation. And so you you almost forget that there's a way to be a human. Like you don't have to suffer through that.

• 21:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I think, you know, that system breeds like really good followers, you know, people that are really smart and diligent and know how to work hard, but the greatest lawyers are not those people. The greatest lawyers are the free thinkers.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Those aren't the named partners.

• 21:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the people that are the rainmakers don't really play by those.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Joe Flom wasn't playing by the rules.

• 22:03Rich Roll?

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, anyway, so many kind of inflection points that we can talk about, but, you know, I think there's, there's, the thing that I want to talk about with you the most, I think, and kind of what this podcast really focuses on is, you know, personal growth and transformation. And obviously, you know, you have sort of this, you know, reputation out in the world for being, you know, the, the, the sort of creator proponent of the frat tire genre, and you've sold a bazillion books. I think it's, what is it, like, over three million now? It's crazy, right?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:36Rich Roll?

  And then you reach this point where you're like, I'm not doing that anymore. And, you know, for lack of a better phrase, like, you're growing up, right? Are you married yet, or you're engaged, right? So you're married now?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:47Rich Roll?

  And you've got a nine-month-old son.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yep, nine-month-old son, Bishop.

• 22:50Rich Roll?

  So you're an adult.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Totally full adult now.

• 22:53Rich Roll?

  And with that, there's a very interesting arc. And in kind of, you know, looking into your story a little bit more deeply and poking around the internet, you know, look, there's no shortage of articles that kind of adhere to the typical, you know, narrative that you would expect. But the one piece that I thought was the most informative and kind of revealing was Michael Ellsworth's piece in Forbes. And that guy's an amazing writer, and I read a lot of the stuff that he does, and, you know, he's very insightful. And that was the only thing that, that I felt like really did you the service of, you know, breaking down what it was that kind of, you know, got you to that place of deciding that this was going to be part of your past and that you were kind of embarking into, you know, a new, you know, a new version of yourself, I guess.

• 23:38Rich Roll?

  And so, so I want to kind of break down that. That process, because I think, you know, really what it, what it, in a nutshell, for me, what it entailed was, you know, really looking at yourself and being honest with yourself about, you know, what led to some of those behaviors that created, you know, the books that were so successful and, and taking stock and evaluation and inventory of, you know, what was making you happy and what wasn't making you happy. And I think, you know, as young guys, right, we're sort of bred, maybe inherently, or maybe socially, to believe that, you know, if you have a fast car and you're, you got tons of girls and you got money in the bank, that you're gonna be happy.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  That's what you want.

• 24:17Rich Roll?

  You are a success story. You could not have been more successful as a writer. You had more than enough money and tons of girls around and all the trappings of, you know, what Madison Avenue would tell you is, is the recipe for being a fulfilled human being. And, you know, where did that land you?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's funny, like, you nailed it, because you probably went through your own version of the same thing. Like, I, for me, it was more like, it was unusual. A lot of the times, the narrative is like you hit rock bottom, right? I didn't ever hit rock, there was no rock bottom for me. You're exactly right. My sort of rock bottom was not one moment. I think it was a series of, of sort of events. And it was like, here I was, I had sold millions of books, I had millions of dollars, I had, I didn't have enough time to sleep with all the women who wanted to sleep with me. I could do anything I wanted, whatever. And I remember when I started thinking, okay, if I just had X, I'd be happy. And X was, X was minus a thousand what I had, right?

• 25:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  And then, so here I am with a thousand X, what I need, what I thought I needed to be successful and happy. And I liked it. It was better than being poor. Make no mistake about it. It was better than where I came from. But I wasn't, like, I wasn't happy. It wasn't satisfying. And so, like, I kind of went through this stage where I was like, okay, I just need to get healthy. I'm not eating right, whatever. So then... Totally like got off grains and sugar and you know, whatever eat ancestral and and all that stuff felt great. Started, you know, doing MMA and Jiu Jitsu and like amazing shape and like that was great, but it's like, okay, um, you know, there were other things I fixed, a lot of other sort of external things and I fixed everything that could

• 25:58Speaker 01

  be fixed to the point where I had this totally perfect, not empty, but just unfulfilling life.

• 26:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  And so it was like, okay, listen, at some point, dude, you gotta turn around and look at yourself because if it's not, if it's nothing external, it has to be internal. And then that was, it wasn't one time and it was, I wish I could be like, oh, it was this moment and this happened and the magic pill saved me. It was just more like, man, I've gotta, I've gotta look at myself and I've gotta look at what I'm doing and I gotta maybe think about the fact that maybe all the ideas or a huge set of them are wrong in my head.

• 26:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, to camp out here for a second, I mean, you know, in my case, you know, I had to get sober, like my partying wasn't nearly as rivaled as yours, but like, you know, my alcoholism definitely, you know, escalated beyond what you experienced and I was sort of, you know, faced with a moment of reckoning on that that compelled me to either, you know, that was gonna kill me or or save me.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:54Rich Roll?

  Um, but I think, you know, in most people's situations, you know, it's very convenient if you have that rock bottom moment and the skies part and you know, the angels descend and you're struck, you know, either sober or with some sort of epiphany about your life.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:09Rich Roll?

  I don't think that that is the normal experience and I see it in sobriety all the time, like people have varying degrees of bottoms, you know, sometimes it's horrible, right? But other times it's just like, you know what, I was, I was just done, like nothing crazy happened, like I just knew, you know, I just woke up one day and it wasn't that different than any other day and I decided I was done. And so what I always say is, you know, if the elevator's going down or the car is driving in the wrong direction, you always have control over that trajectory, right? But it's just harder when you're not, you know, in a, in a terrific amount of pain.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  When you don't have to make the decision.

• 27:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like pain is the ultimate motivator, right?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:43Rich Roll?

  How do you make that decision when you're not in that, that amount of pain? It sounds like you were in a little bit of pain. I mean, you were in enough pain to be reflective.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  You know what it was, dude? I was lonely, like in a genuine, like honest way. Uh, I don't mean like I didn't have people, I had great friends and I had a lot of girls, but I was.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  It's hard for me, I think I'm still coming to terms with the the true depth of what and where I was. But I think it was just basically, I was really lonely. Like, I realized, like, um, most of what I had, it's not that it was bad, it was just, you know, it's like, fast food tastes really good, but doesn't, you know, doesn't, doesn't get you where you wanna go.

• 28:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  And I kinda had, I think, uh, that was sort of my life. You know, like, I was proud of a lot of things I'd done, but it was like, where was I? What was I, what was I doing? I always say now, um, to people, like, the things that matter in life, all, all life really boils down to for humans are the relationships you have with the people you love and the things you do that matter to, uh, other people, right? And so at that point, I'd written books that millions of people had loved and laughed at and helped. Uh, you know, entertainment. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, some, uh, earth-moving thing, but it was, it was entertaining. And that was about it, you know? And, and I, to, to me, it was like, man, I can do a lot of amazing shit, and all I've done is made people laugh. There's nothing wrong with making people laugh. Louis C.K. makes the world a much better place.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  But it's like, mm, you know, my stuff was like, okay, fine, but, uh, and then on the other hand, like, I, I didn't have, I had good friends, but it's like, I feel like so much around me, I got stuck in that celebrity trap, where so much of it, uh, wasn't real, you know? And it was, like, so much of it was predicated on what I meant to people in their life, not what our relationship was, you know? It's like, oh, like, I, I'm helping talk about this movie, or I'm the whatever, and it's like, not bad people, but just like, these aren't real relationships.

• 29:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  You know?

• 29:47Rich Roll?

  I mean, you know, I've lived in Los Angeles for a long time, and, you know, I can tell you for a fact that, you know, I've had direct experiences with a lot of people who are enormously successful and wealthy, and some of the most miserable, miserable people I've ever met. And people that don't treat other people very well, you know? And they're unhappy, and, and, you know, it's always the next thing that's gonna make them happy. Getting the next movie set up, or, you know, I'm gonna trade in the Tesla for a Ferrari.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Right, and that'll, that'll make it better.

• 30:14Rich Roll?

  You'll chase that to your grave, you know? Whether it's the next heroin fix, or the next mansion, it does not matter. And I've got a buddy right now. He's a really handsome, successful guy and he's recently, he's going through a divorce and he's, and he's going nuts with girls, like crazy, crazy, you know, just going bananas, right? And he just finally like hit his, hit the wall with it and he's like, "It does not work. It does, it does not work. It's not working. It's not working. It's an inside job. It's an inside job. Like, this is not making me happy."

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Nothing in that vagina is gonna solve your problems. If it feels good, sex is great. Women are amazing, but having sex with lots of them doesn't, it doesn't, in the most starkly honest, raw way, you can't bury your pain in a, in a pussy, you know? Like, you can't, you can't get rid of your loneliness by filling your, you know, by, you know, filling your life with women, lots of different women. It just doesn't, it's not, I, I don't mean it like in a bad way. In, in a weird way, I, I wouldn't take back what I went through. I love, I had a lot of good times, right? But it's like, I'm one of those people that's gotta learn the hard way, you know? And my hard way was hard, but it was also fun. But yeah, like, I don't, it's, I have a wife now, I sleep with one woman, and it's like,

• 31:32Speaker 01

  it's actually, it's weirdly way more satisfactory and fulfilling in almost every single way, right? Listen, let's not, there's, there's, there's always gonna be appeal to, "That's a pretty woman, I'd really like to hook up with her." But like, other than that sort of like normal, animalistic sort of novelty type situation, almost everything is better about having real connections with amazing people and having real relationships. I don't know any other way to put it, you know?

• 32:04Rich Roll?

  Certainly, you know, for a fact.

• 32:14Rich Roll?

  I feel like, you know, I listen to a couple of interviews with you and there always seems to be this sort of implicit desire in the interviewer for you to distance yourself from the things that you've done in your past, through your twenties.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  They always want me to repent.

• 32:29Rich Roll?

  And have you kind of say, "I'm ashamed of this."

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yes. Always want me to repent, always.

• 32:33Rich Roll?

  They're wanting you to do that and you're always very clear that you own it and that you don't regret it. And I think, you know, it's easy to criticize you for that, but I think that that growth requires you to own your past and to get to a place where, you know, you can just accept it and, you know, hold it out to the world without repercussion and just say, this is who I am, you know, and in order to grow, I think you have to do that. Because if you are ashamed of it, or you have, that means you have unresolved issues within yourself about it. And I think that that is an impediment to kind of getting to the next level.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  I, dude, I could not agree more. I, um, I always have this saying, like, uh, like, um, I wasn't deformed, I don't need to reform. I just went through sort of a phase and it was, I was an incomplete person, but the way you become complete is you figure that out, you know? Uh, just like, I played with G.I. Joes when I was 10. I didn't do that when I was 20, doesn't mean what I did when I was 10 was wrong, it was a phase. It's how you get to, you know, how you get to good human relations and object relations is you start with dolls, right? Same thing. And people, a lot of people don't get that. There's, I think, because there's a lot of, there's a narrative in our culture that it's not okay to do certain things.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And it's not okay to then, like, not, to not repent, like, you have to, like, I, I, I, this might be way off base or way, a very different discussion, but like, I think this falls into line with, like, the medicalization of addiction and disease, like, addiction is just not a disease. Addiction's terrible in so many ways, but it's not, there's just, it's not, you don't catch alcoholism. It doesn't happen that way, like, you, lots of problems, lots of issues with that, but like, um, I just don't, I don't feel like, um, I just don't feel like I, you know what the idea, I think the idea stems from,

• 34:34Speaker 01

  if addiction is a disease, then you can forgive the addict because it wasn't their fault, right? But, um, And I'm not trying to say like addiction is a conscious decision every time because I get like, you know, there's other dynamics at play that make it much more complex. But um, it's okay to say something like, you know what, I drank a lot because I was sad and lonely and I didn't know what else to do, or I liked drinking or whatever. And then it became a problem and then I decided, you know, I needed to solve it and I solved it, you know? And it doesn't have to be a disease. You can just, exactly what you said. You can just own your problem and admit that it was a problem and uh, and own, you know,

• 35:20Speaker 01

  even the good parts of it, like you weren't alcoholic, I bet you still had like, that was fun that one time we went out drinking or whatever, you know? It doesn't all have to be terrible. You don't have to like, oh, we gotta fit this norm and then we have to disown everything about our past.

• 35:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're talking about two different things in terms of like, you know, looking back on my drinking career. Like, you know, in the early days, yeah, I had a lot of fun. And actually, it helped socialize me. It brought me out of my, you know, I was a very insular, like, you know, kind of isolated kid. It was, you know, had difficulty interacting with people and making friends. And it allowed me to come out of my shell, but it also turned on me. I mean, I would, I would disagree with you on the disease model. And I think as somebody who is an alcoholic and I'm very involved in the recovery community, like I'm around these people all the time. You know, it truly is an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind. And, you know, I've been around a long time and, you know, it's still something I have to work on all the time with all the interpersonal work that I've done.

• 36:16Rich Roll?

  And it seems like, you know, every couple of years, somebody will come along with like sort of a new version of how to treat this disease. And I'm not to say that any one way is better than any other. And whether it's a disease or it isn't, doesn't really interest me. Like I have a way of resolving it for myself, like on a daily basis that works and works for my friends. And, you know, I've seen it do amazing things for people and it's not perfect. And that's not to say that there aren't other ways that are valid or worth considering. But, you know, I think that's a whole other podcast we could do, you know what I mean? But I think that, you know, I think for me, you know, if I, if all I did was start eating really well and, and, you know, training my body and maybe go see a shrink.

• 36:58Rich Roll?

  I don't know that that would resolve my alcohol problem, you know?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  I don't know either.

• 37:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so.

• 37:05Rich Roll?

  But anyway, we're uh.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Well, what do you, um, let me, let me ask you. So, uh, cause obviously like I'm, I'm not a fucking addiction expert, right? I just, whatever, um, see things, read things, interact with people. There's a lot of sort of thought in this area that addiction is actually a problem of human connection. And not really, it's not a disease model, meaning like, um, you know what I mean? We don't have to go deep into that. But there's a lot of research on a lot of people who are like, look, addiction is primarily, uh, and there's a lot of evidence that I think points to this. It might be right, am I not, right? I'm not gonna like argue this position. But what do you think about that idea that, that addiction is primarily, uh, a, a problem of disconnection from other people?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  And that whether it's gambling, or sex, or alcohol, or heroin, whatever, is a way of sort of absolve, resolving that pain? Or sort of filling that lack of connection? Does that make sense?

• 37:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course. There's wisdom in that for sure. I don't know that I would say that it's predominantly a function of that. But I think that part of the solution is creating, you know, greater and deeper interpersonal emotional connection with other people. And, you know, part of the thing that kind of goes on here when, when, you know, sort of experts, you know, suddenly come to the forefront and are offering different ideas about, you know, what this is and how to treat it. Is that, um, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous is anonymous at the level of press, radio and film. So there, by, by very definition, built into the essence of what this is, they're really not allowed to respond.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:36Rich Roll?

  You know, and that's part of the fabric of why it's been able to, you know, exist and grow for so many years. Because of its sort of deep little, deep politicization, deep politicization of it, right? So, so there's never a counterpoint to that. So I think that the dialogue becomes a little bit one-sided. But I think for me, you know, a big part of the solution is being connected to other people that, you know, share, share the affliction that, that, that I have and working through those issues or things that come up together is a fundamental aspect of getting better.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, most of the data shows like AA, for the most part, everything you do in AA is totally worthless. Except for, no, except for the, the, the group, the people, like, like the, except the higher being, whatever, like, if you look at like, from my understanding, again, I'm not like the expert, but like so much of it is like, you could take this out and it wouldn't statistically affect outcomes, but the one thing that, that I think over and over has major statistical effects on outcome, like big ones, in fact, the biggest one is, uh, the group itself, like the connection to other people, the accountability, the, exactly what you just said, the social, connective sort of aspect. I, I think that applies way more than just addiction.

• 39:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the social fundamental sort of aspect of, of group gatherings is, is certainly critical to it, but it's really only one part of it.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  It's not just a group gathering, it's also the relationships that a group creates, and all that.

• 40:02Rich Roll?

  But also, you know, woven within that, and like, I gotta be careful because I'm not really supposed to talk about it specifically, but, you know, there, everybody knows there's 12 steps, right? And these 12 steps are really kind of, they're, it's, it's really, um, you know, when these guys wrote this book a long time ago, it's pretty prophetic, because it's a pretty in-depth spiritual, spiritual program that requires you to really, you know, do what you did in psychoanalysis, which is take inventory, own your past, make peace with it, make amends to other people, you know, constantly be vigilant about your character defects and trying to correct them, and that's the work. You know what I mean? And then the group part of it is

• 40:41Rich Roll?

  sharing collective experiences about going through those steps and what that means and stuff that comes up and how life crops up and, you know, the, the truth is, and to get back to the disease model is, you know, the drug or the drink is the solution to the problem. The problem isn't the alcohol or the drug, it rests within the person, right? And so you can, and so a lot of these people who are coming out and saying, well, there's a different way of doing this and, you know, let's, let's try moderation or all these sorts of things, like,

• 41:11Rich Roll?

  They might be successful in putting distance between a drug or a drink and an individual.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:16Rich Roll?

  But they're not really addressing the underlying drive that's compelling that person to use, right? Which, as you know, from the work that you've done, is really kind of a deep down thing that requires a lot of fucking work.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely, no doubt. I like, I don't, yes, absolutely. It's funny, you said a second ago, something like, like, in a way, I almost think, I don't want to say, nothing boils down to, everything boils down to this, that there's almost nothing where it's like you can reduce everything down to that. I wish there was, that would be awesome. But like, I feel like so much of what we talk about, not just you, like everyone, like, oh, this problem, that problem, teen pregnancy, addiction, so much of it feels like, the more sort of you understand yourself and the more I think you dig into your own problems, almost anyone, you realize, oh wow, like, I don't have this sort of connections to myself and to other people,

• 42:09Speaker 01

  and the depth of relationships that I really sort of, that I'm almost made for. I mean, humans on a biological level are evolved to be, we don't exist independently. Our human raised without other humans is like, I mean, quite literally, an animal in the truest sense. They don't speak, they don't, they don't have higher order cognitive thought, they don't, they can't exist without sort of social connections. We're almost like this weird sort of networked animal, like a fax machine. A fax machine by itself is worthless, and two of them don't have a whole lot of worth, but once you start to get a bunch, then it's like really useful, right? Humans almost do the same thing. I feel like so much in our, especially Western society, disconnects us from other individuals and from a group sort of unit,

• 42:50Speaker 01

  and so we get these neuroses that are a function of, right, exactly, the underlying cause, you know?

• 42:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's only accelerating, and ironically, the internet is feeling that.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  You think? I thought it's, I think it's going the other way, in a lot of ways.

• 43:03Rich Roll?

  I don't know. I mean, I think that it's easier than ever to feel like you're connected by staring at your laptop, you know,

• 43:09Speaker 01

  And you're not really connected, totally.

• 43:10Rich Roll?

  And then you never go outside and actually meet up with your friends and do anything together.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  A hundred percent agree, but I to me, I feel like it seems like um what starts the problem can eventually solve it. You just have to go through that dip, right? And so it seems to me like uh uh technology definitely for a while makes it worse. Cause Twitter is like, oh yeah, I'm connect these people. You're not connected at all. It's total bullshit, right? Facebook and it's total bullshit. All I I'm totally on board with that a hundred percent. But the way through that trough is to keep going uh because uh like I feel like socially we develop almost antibodies to this stuff. If you notice that I my Facebook feed has changed fundamentally over the last four or five years, right?

• 43:52Rich Roll?

  What way?

• 43:52Speaker 01

  I I feel like it uh definitely four, five, six years ago when Facebook really peaked. Uh I feel like there was just, at least with my group of of people who were, I feel like there were so many people and it was so much like, look at how great my life is and blah, blah, blah. And like now it's it's become a lot less about bragging and a lot less about stupid meme sharing. And it's people are starting to figure out ways to actually connect on Facebook or they're just not using it. Because it's uh it's like eating fast food, right? It's like you're getting, it's unfulfilling and you get sick, right? And so I I feel like technology uh might, I don't know if it took us apart.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  I think it just it exacerbated uh uh commercial uh what commercial industrial culture already done. But I think if we keep going, it push, it eventually pushes it back together because all of it is still a way to connect. Facebook is like an improvement over no connection. Twitter is an improvement over no connection. It's crappy, but it's better than nothing and the next iteration is better. And the next iteration is better where eventually I think techs uh technology like electricity and transportation moves into the background and brings forward what we all ultimately want is to connect to each other. And feel safe and then respected and appreciated, that kind of stuff, you know?

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's a pretty optimistic view of it.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  It is, it is.

• 45:12Rich Roll?

  Cause like, you know, I think that so many of these these networks are really blown out right now. Like, I I don't know if you've noticed, but like if you were to throw a tweet out, maybe three, four, five years, five years.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Way more response than now.

• 45:25Rich Roll?

  The amount of like engagement that you get was like a big deal, right? Um, but now it's just, it's just a drop in the stream because everybody's following so many people and you know, it just, it, nothing gets noticed anymore and you know, certainly true for Facebook and all these.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's why Snapchat's huge and I think that like the, the, the cycles are speeding up because I think the sort of, that sort of social interaction, the, the disconnected social network interaction, I think will be a phase. And I think social will eventually be, be built into things and will learn to use it in a way that like actually connects us. And I don't know exactly what that looks like because I would start the goddamn company if I knew.

• 46:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Right? Um, but like, I feel like everything we do in, in, in, uh, we take all this technology that's not designed. Twitter was not designed to be a social platform at all in any way, shape or form. And people formed it to that use because that's all what we desperately want is to connect with each other. And whether we admit it or whatever, that's what we want. And sometimes it's toxic, sometimes it's not in a healthy way, sometimes it is. But I, I feel like we're going to keep, people are starting to really figure that out and starting to, there's a lot of really lame attempts at things that connect us that don't actually connect us because people are just imitating. But every now and then something comes along. It's like, wow, this is actually a change and it does bring, excuse me. It does bring us closer. Like Periscope is an improvement on Twitter.

• 46:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  It's still crappy. It's still ridiculous. Whatever's next is going to be better and it'll just keep going and going until I feel like, um, I, I mean, we're evolved to live in, uh, you know, groups of a hundred and fifty, dumbbar's number, right? And everyone knows everyone and we can manage the relationships between everyone or some, some group beyond just one or two or three people or drinking buddies or whatever, you know? And, uh, I don't know. It is absolutely an optimistic view, but I feel like, um, it's not an accident that, that tech started as tech and now the tech is moving into the background. And now the design and the art and the connectivity is really starting, uh, to, to emerge and starting to actually bring people together.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  You know?

• 47:37Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 47:39Rich Roll?

  I mean, in your sort of, you know, ventures in the, in the tech startup world and angel investing and all of that. I mean, are, what are you seeing that's interesting in terms of like trends in that arena?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I I actually haven't done a lot of investing last six months or a year because everything feels um uh like iterative and derivatives to me. Yeah, uh uh the uh every now and then I'll see something that's really cool. The only cool stuff I see happening now is all the really old sort of boring commodity businesses are starting to get ri- people are starting to really look at those seriously. Healthcare is starting to uh uh it's it's corrosive and toxic as the healthcare insurance industry is in America and it's awful. Whether you love socialized medicine or hate it, you have you can't uh look at our system and think it works. It's terrible. And people with a lot of brains and a lot of power uh and a lot of ability are starting to look at that system. Um transportation,

• 48:34Speaker 01

  not just Uber, but like uh logistical transportation, ships, trucks, things like that. Uh you know, like con- concrete, contracting, building stuff. These really boring old hun- you know, 20th century businesses could be so much better in so many ways. And that's the really interesting, the really, really, really interesting work and the really smart money right now is flowing into that. Um but that's the and and it's it's not sexy. Like, no one's like, oh, this is like a really cool sort of uh software database that helps us uh uh you know, route shipping. Do you know shipping container stuff used to be done like paper and pencil up until like two years ago? Like craziness, nonsense.

• 49:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's why companies like Oracle, you know, is sort of behind the scenes, solving like massive problems in business become quietly so successful.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:24Rich Roll?

  There's nothing sexy about it, but.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  No, databases are ne- they can't be sexy. I mean, like, I'm an investor in pounds here, and they're doing, the stuff they're doing is so off the charts amazing. It's hard to even believe, right? Um the other thing I think that's good, that's really kind of interesting is every field, you're gonna start seeing startups that are blank plus AI, right? So whether it's social media plus AI, or journalism plus AI, or um whatever, hotel booking plus AI. Like, artificial intelligence hit the tipping point last year, last year, this year, some point, sometime last year, where machine learning and deep learning and real like natural language processing, all that stuff came together. And it's like one of those things where it's like slow, slow, slow all at once. Right now...

• 50:10Speaker 01

  I would say eighty percent, I think, of the finance news that you read, if you read any, and probably fifty percent of the sports stuff, not the commentary, but the actual, just basic reporting, written by algorithms.

• 50:22Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  And you have no idea, none.

• 50:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I was listening to Sam Harris talk about AI on Joe Rogan's podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he had just come back from a conference where all the biggest minds in that space had convened.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:37Rich Roll?

  He just said it's exhilarating, but also completely terrifying because of, you know, sort of how advanced these minds are and kind of where it's heading and...

• 50:47Speaker 01

  They're not that... No, what's crazy is they're not that advanced. No, you have an iPhone, right?

• 50:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  How many times is your iPhone autocorrected to the wrong word?

• 50:55Rich Roll?

  Oh, most of the time.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Every day?

• 50:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Okay, so like...

• 50:58Rich Roll?

  Can it learn that it... Can it just simply learn that when I type these letters that what I mean is because I'm constantly overriding the autocorrect?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  It should, and it doesn't, right? And it's not because Apple's bad at their job, it's because it's actually way harder than you think. So here's what I've sort of learned about, because I thought about investing in a lot of those companies, and I realized I just don't have the expertise, but I learned a lot about them. And basically, AI and machine learning and those sorts of companies are going to be extremely good at things that humans are bad at, which is deep processing that is a fast, quick deep processing that is just one sort of linear thing. But thinking laterally, humans are very good at, associations, all those sorts of things, and computers are bad at it and not even close to being good yet.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  So, like, listen, is Skynet gonna become self-aware and send the robots after us? I mean, I don't know. Like, some smart people think yes, some smart people think no, but that's decades away, you know? Like, maybe our kids are gonna have to deal with that.

• 52:04Rich Roll?

  But you say decades like that's a long time from now.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  In the world we live in, in the world we live in, that's a long time.

• 52:11Rich Roll?

  That's pretty frightening as a father of a nine-month-old, right?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Well, I'll prepare my son, I'll have him watch The Terminator.

• 52:19Rich Roll?

  We don't have to worry about Skynet for decades.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I'm not really worried about that. I feel like what's gonna happen is you're gonna see a lot of sort of repetitious, you're gonna see a lot of, people think it's like low-level unskilled labor that's in trouble. It's not. If you're a hotel clerk, like if you're a bellboy, machines aren't replacing you because the infrastructure to build for that is really hard. They've built hotels like that in Japan. They're actually really expensive, right? What's actually gonna be replaced are middle-of-the-road professionals, doctors, lawyers. People who are supposed to be really smart at high-level

• 53:00Speaker 01

  pattern recognition are, but, done. Like Watson, right now, today, IBM was gonna start selling Watson services as diagnostic tool, and their bar was-

• 53:13Rich Roll?

  Watson is the supercomputer.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, the one that beat what's-his-face at Jeopardy and won a bunch of Jeopardies, and then beat what's-his-face at chess, that supercomputer. When that supercomputer, or derivation of it, could beat ten of the best, or ten board-certified, like, whatever, oncologists at cancer diagnosis, could beat them, then they would start selling the services. It did that like three weeks ago, I think, or a month ago.

• 53:39Rich Roll?

  Oh, really? Interesting.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Right. And these are like, "Oh, I'm a doctor. No one can do what I can do." Bullshit. Nurses aren't gonna be replaced because administering medicine, nurses, well, the nurse model of medicine is totally different than doctor model. Doctors, diagnosis, whatever. Nurses, prevention, and care, right? So connecting with humans, software and robots aren't gonna be doing that for a long time. Nurses are totally safe, might become more valuable. Doctors actually are in trouble. Paralegals doing fine. Lawyers might not be.

• 54:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I mean, you still have to go to court and make an argument.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So trial lawyers are fine, but like if you're doing like, you know, doc review, you're done, right?

• 54:20Rich Roll?

  That's paralegal work.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Mostly, well, okay, yes. So document review, a lot of-

• 54:26Rich Roll?

  All the processing of like giant commercial litigation and like the massive amounts of paperwork and reviewing-

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Which is all just monkeys arguing over status anyway.

• 54:33Rich Roll?

  There's already like a lot of software for that kind of stuff.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  But it's, I mean, it's crazy how good that stuff is getting and the speed at which it's getting that way is um that stuff where like uh is those those people are in trouble. They're gonna have to find uh which is fine because I if you're gonna screw a class of workers, I'd much rather screw screw uh middle to a middle upper class professionals because they're ostensibly can find other work. If you're just a laborer, you're gonna have a much harder time and our society's not well equipped to sort of teach you sort of how to how to use intellectual capital, et cetera, et cetera. Um uh but like those people are actually okay. Service industry jobs are are okay because it's really hard to replicate a smile, human interaction, et cetera. It's really easy to replicate high level pattern recognition.

• 55:20Rich Roll?

  Interesting. That was a good jag in the other in an on uh

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Totally unrelated direction.

• 55:26Rich Roll?

  Direction, yeah. No, I like it. But um yeah, to kind of bring it back to, you know, your kind of uh personal evolution like you you know, you were saying that you didn't have, there wasn't like a bottom that you experienced, but there was a, you know, a moment where you were you made this decision to go into therapy, right?

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:44Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And so is that something you're still doing?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  I actually, uh, yes, I'm done with psychoanalysis uh next week or the week after.

• 55:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How do you decide that you're done?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Uh, well, so uh it's not supposed to be an endless process. It's supposed to be you go in and you identify things that you want to fix or rectify or situations you want to solve or whatever. And just figuring out what your problems are and what you want to fix takes a while. And then you work on them. And then when you feel, when you and the analyst feel like that basically, the goal is you want to develop the tools, you you want to be able to recognize what your issues are, uh, recognize when they come up and then have the tools to solve them yourself. So when you, when you feel like um you don't need to go to your analyst because you can solve the problems because of what you've learned in analysis, then generally speaking, that means you're ready to quit, you know?

• 56:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:40Rich Roll?

  And this was motivated initially by a girl you were dating, right? Who, who basically decided to do this and you were able to recognize a change in her?

• 56:49Speaker 01

  No, not a girl I was dating, a friend of mine. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was one of those things where, like I said, I knew I fixed all my problems in quotes and I still wasn't happy, I was still lonely, I still didn't have the life I wanted. And so I knew that whatever issues I had were inside of me. And so I tried a lot of things. Most stuff didn't work, either because it doesn't work or because I just didn't do it right.

• 57:10Rich Roll?

  What kind of stuff did you try?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  You know, like all the easy stuff. Yoga. Meditation works. I wasn't doing it right for a long time, so I quit. Meditation is fantastic, though. I wasn't mature enough already enough for it when I first started. So I tried that and quit. You know, different types of therapeutic modalities, different types of, you know, therapies. Just, there's a million things.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Cognitive behavioral therapy is like a much easier type of therapy. And that's like good for behavioral changes. That wasn't my problem. My problem was emotions, not behavior. Behavior that maybe that came from emotions and sort of thought patterns, but it wasn't surface stuff. It was deep. And so for me, psychoanalysis is really, it's just one type of talk therapy. There's a bunch and most of them work for different sorts of people. I needed one that was very...

• 58:04Speaker 01

  It was like I needed a thinking person's therapy. I'm not, I am, I listen to my gut, but I'm not a super intuitive person, if you know what I mean? Like, I'm not one of those people who just kind of feels his way to something. I have to understand it before all sort of, I'm not hyper rational, like I'm not Elon Musk or something, but I'm, I'm in that, more in that category than I am in this sort of feel your way to it category. And so for those sorts of people, analysis is really good because you're talking specifically and directly about issues. You're feeling them, but then you're also talking about them in the abstract and you're kind of identifying things. That was a problem for me is sometimes identifying my emotions. What was I feeling?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Even the why, what, I almost knew all my problems the day I walked in. It wasn't for me, oh, I had no idea that, you know, my mom wasn't very good or whatever. Like, I knew all that shit. It was more connecting what I understood to the emotions I was feeling and then seeing the results. Right? That was, that mental exercise was very difficult for me. It took me a long... Long time, four years, four days a week is a long time, dude.

• 59:12Rich Roll?

  Four days a week.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Four days a week, yeah. It's serious. It's not like you gotta go every day, basically.

• 59:17Rich Roll?

  Freudian, right? Freudian?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, not really. There's no psychoanalysis that's Freudian anymore. Freud sort of started it, but no one really subscribes to what anyone would call Freudian psychoanalysis. It's sort of like, no one calls themselves an Aristotelian philosopher anymore, even though Aristotle's one of the fathers of philosophy. Freud was the first one to really, at least in Western practice, identify the unconscious and identify sort of how it works and sort of set those wheels in motion. But analysis has evolved so far beyond Freud that he's only relevant with a lot of core fundamental stuff and then some things at the fringes he's still right about. But he was more wrong than he was right about the details.

• 1:00:01Rich Roll?

  But are you talking in general terms about, you know, the id, the ego, the superego?

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  I don't think we've ever used those terms in analysis, yeah, never.

• 1:00:09Rich Roll?

  And does it involve kind of identifying what those triggers are that are leading to those behavior patterns that are making you unhappy?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  No, that's sort of, sort of.

• 1:00:18Rich Roll?

  The road signs?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Sort of. It's more like, it's more... So, you don't really go directly. It's very frustrating to me, analysis, because you don't go directly at things. You come in and you talk about what's on your mind, right? You can't be like, "Oh, like, you know, let's talk about why I'm sad." Because as soon as you start talking about that stuff in the abstract, you move above the emotion and just into intellectual stuff. And then it's super easy to rationalize and to talk around it. And then you're disconnected from your sort of unconscious. Really, the goal of analysis is to connect the conscious to the unconscious. Not directly, because it's impossible. The unconscious is very much a black box. That's why it's called the unconscious.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  But it's more about teaching you to not just see, but to feel sort of things that you weren't letting yourself see or feel before. So, for example, like, I used to have, I used to, I still do, sort of an anger problem. I used to be way worse than I am now. And the only reason I'm good now is better, not good. I'm still a long way to go. I'm better is because... I'm good at understanding, like, oh, I'm getting pissed off, or I'm angry, or whatever. It used to be like my, not emotions possess me, but it's like, you know, you meet someone, you feel like they don't know what's going on in their own life? Analysis is about helping you understand what's going on in your own life.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Not because you solve it and it's done, but because you have the tools now to sort of deal with it, right? Um, I think, really, I took the leap when last year I started pairing meditation with analysis, because they're actually the 180-degree opposite way to deal with the same problem. Uh, and meditation for me was very, very, once I was, I think, mature enough, I'd done enough analysis, and I'd accepted enough things about myself, and kind of like, um, learned enough about my own brain. Like, meditation works when you sit there, and you're silent, and you focus on your breath, and then you let the things come up that you otherwise don't let come up.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  And you can't, man, it took me so long to stop being judgmental about it, and stop trying to push it away. That's why meditation didn't work for me. I'd sit there like, oh, my mind's empty, and it's like, dude, you haven't reached enlightenment in 20 minutes, you know? Like, you're pushing things out. So I had to learn how to let them come up, and then deal with the anxiety, or the fear, or the sadness, or the shame, or whatever comes up. And then you, like, recognize it, you accept that it's there, you let it flow over you, you can investigate it, don't judge it, don't try and push it away, let it have its say, in a way. And then, it doesn't go away, it just kind of like, it stops, um, having a control or a power over you, because you've now recognized it. You know? Does that make sense?

• 1:03:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, to me, it does, for sure. I mean, I'm an active meditation person. I mean, it, it really is empowering to understand that, um, the vagaries of your thinking mind are distinct from your higher consciousness.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:24Rich Roll?

  And that there is a dividing line between the two. And that's the first step in starting to recognize that you can actually have power or control over those emotions, and that you don't have to be a victim, or just fall prey to them as they arise, right? So in the in the sense that these are two very different disciplines, analysis and meditation, you know, one is very active. You're sort of exploring the rational, you know, thinking mind as a way to tap into the unconscious mind, whereas meditation is the allowing.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Right. You're shutting off the rational mind and letting the other thing come up.

• 1:03:55Rich Roll?

  Or trying to get to that place where you can transcend it, to get more clarity.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never gotten close to that. Like, I'm just happy when like I can like, when I can let my unconscious go where it wants to go and not try and direct it and not try and like, like push it. Dude, it's crazy. It seems like how hard can it be to sit there and not say anything, right?

• 1:04:16Rich Roll?

  It's the hardest thing.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Fucking hard, man. It's really, if you're doing it right.

• 1:04:19Rich Roll?

  But, man, but the thing is, when you get to that place and you're like, oh, they're just emotions.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:26Rich Roll?

  They're not gonna kill me. I actually have a choice. Like, I don't have to engage that. Like, wow, I never realized that before.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  It's there. It's a part of me, but I don't have to, right? I don't have to react to it or engage it. Yeah. I think maybe, I think I've, I try to get 20 minutes in a day. Thirty is sort of my goal. Maybe once or twice I've gotten to 45. Man, it's embarrassing almost.

• 1:04:48Rich Roll?

  Are you doing a specific method or?

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  No, not really. I've read a bunch of sort of the books and, you know, like Tibetan Zen, you know, whatever, a lot of Sam Harris's stuff you mentioned. I don't, I feel like, honestly, the, the book that helped me the most, and I'm not sure this would be where people should start. It worked really well for me, though, was Mark Epstein's book, The Trauma of Everyday Life. So Mark Epstein is a psychoanalyst and a Buddhist, practicing, he's been a Buddhist for even longer than he's been an analyst. And he's one of the guys who has done, to me, an amazing job of sort of reconciling the two disciplines and explaining that they really are very similar. They're just totally opposite ways to sort of approach the same problem. And the Trauma of Everyday

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Life is actually an analytic, psychoanalytic analysis of the life of Buddha, the actual Buddha, right? And it was pretty mind blowing. And he kind of taught, like, I don't want to say real Buddhism. But just the original sort of form of Buddhism. Um, and uh, uh, through the, the story. And it's very simple, like that's the thing with meditation. It doesn't need to be complex. It can be really simple, actually.

• 1:05:59Rich Roll?

  Well, that's, that's, you know, you're a smart guy. You want to analyze everything. You want to understand it completely. And that's why meditation is so frustrating and eluding because you're never going to do it that way. And there's a million different ways in and different modalities and strategies and practices and all that sort of stuff. And you can get so caught up in chasing that that you actually never sit down and fucking do it.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  That, that was a big part of the problem for me.

• 1:06:21Rich Roll?

  So my, my solution to that, because I've been struggling for like 15 years, 16 years, like trying to get to a place where I could do it consistently.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:29Rich Roll?

  Was to just let go of all of that. And I, I just, um, started using, uh, Headspace, the Headspace app.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I haven't used it, but I know, yeah, that one in Calm, people recommend a lot.

• 1:06:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's, it's good. And, and Andy Putacum, who's the guy who voices all the guided meditations. And he founded the company. They're down in Venice and, you know, he was a Buddhist monk for like 10 years. Like he, he's put in his 10,000 hours. The guy knows what he's talking about. But it's very, you know, it's very palatable in the sense that, you know, he's not trying to use vernacular that you can't understand or, or, or trying to make it tricky. It's just very user friendly. And the most important thing is, is just allow me to do it. It just makes it easy. And so it makes it easier to actually do it because that's more important than whatever, you know, type you're trying to pursue, I think.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Dude, it's crazy to me to think that like the hardest part of my day is not building a company. It's not writing things that millions of people want to read. It's not, it's sitting quietly for 30 minutes with my thoughts. Is the fucking hardest part of my day. How nuts is that?

• 1:07:29Rich Roll?

  It's super hard.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  It's so, man, it's like.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  It makes it, it makes it even more frustrating.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. It, it's like.

• 1:07:37Rich Roll?

  Because there couldn't be anything easier.

• 1:07:41Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  It's crazy to me how hard it is. It's almost like, you read like, I've read, of course, like, like, like I totally am, I read so many books, everything from like The Buddha in Blue Jeans to The Unquiet Mind, Thich Nhat Hanh stuff, like all those guys, you know, Pema Chodron, like, and like.

• 1:08:04Rich Roll?

  None of that translated into you actually doing it?

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  No, of course not, because that's why I'm reading it, so I don't have to do it.

• 1:08:09Rich Roll?

  It's sort of, you know, in recovery, they say like self-knowledge will avail you nothing, you know, it's sort of like intellectualizing everything and understand, like, oh, I get, I get what that means, like, I got it, I'm good. It's like, no, that's very different from actually practicing it and doing it.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Right, it's like, yeah, you read all the books you want about basketball, go out there and hit a three-pointer. It's not the same thing. It's totally true with meditation. It drove me so nuts. It's still, it's still like one of those weird sort of paradoxes that like, at least are hard for the human mind to sort of like reconcile, like, how can the hardest thing in my life be sitting there and focusing on my brain?

• 1:08:47Rich Roll?

  Right. And you just fight yourself, you know, and it's like, all you have to do is just let go of that, like, argument, you know?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Oh dude, I'm the worst at it. I'm the worst. I'm the worst. It's embarrassing.

• 1:08:57Rich Roll?

  All right, well, congratulations on almost graduating from analysis.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:01Rich Roll?

  But, you know, when I, when I kind of, you know, look at your books and your writings and, you know, I think that, that, you know, whether, whether, you know, people are a fan of yours or not, you know, the writing is exceptional and the storytelling is exceptional. I'm not sure that the storytelling gets enough credit, because that's what distinguishes you from every other dude out there who's trying to write in your genre. Like, you're, you have a very, you know, developed capacity for how to, you know, weave a yarn and do it in a compelling way. And I think that's, that's probably the biggest reason why your books have been so successful.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:09:36Rich Roll?

  And the second aspect of that is, you know, the emotional truth that carries through it. And part of that emotional truth for me is, you know, I see like a little bit of a... You know, there's a little bit of a, there's a little bit of tragedy in there. You know what I mean? So, I see a guy who's trying, who's searching for answers in all the wrong ways, and is celebrating that, but you know, like, where is this? You can't help but say, where is this leading?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  You know what one of my friends said about this? It's actually the girl who got me into analysis. She wrote something, and it wrote it like, it's like eight years ago. And it was so, like, stunning. It's like one of those things where someone says something and it just cuts through everything and hits right at the heart. And it was, it was something like, I'm paraphrasing, but basically it was like, Tucker writes his stuff that's so, it's, it's, it's hubris and boisterous and arrogant, but then he flips into this heartbreaking, sad little boy. And you see it just quick enough to know it's there before he goes back to, to the Tucker Max you understand.

• 1:10:42Rich Roll?

  Because you don't want to wallow there for too long.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, you can't, because then it's not funny, right? But, but she's like, that's why the people that love him, love him, is because they see that. And, and they contrast that. And I remember, I read that, like, when I was like 28, right, or 29. And it, it, it both, like, it cut me so deep at that time in my life, because it revealed the truth that was so profound, like, I couldn't even argue with it, right? I remember getting angry, actually, is what I, because that's how you deal with your emotions when you're me and 29, you just get angry instead of sad or whatever. And so, I like, but I didn't, like, I remember, I like, I didn't even argue, I just got really angry and, I don't know, I broke something or something with a girl, who knows what I did.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  But like, it stuck with me, like, the way you can't get a truth out of your head that you know is true, but you don't want to face. And it was like, that was one of the things, I feel like, that, um... That whenever like I get off center, I always think about that because it's true. It's exactly what you just said. There's like a genuine, I never, I didn't write this on, I didn't do this on purpose. It's not like, oh yeah, here's what I'll do. I'll put in this cool little heartbreaking thing here. And of course not, like all I did was when I was writing, I was like, what's the truth? What's, what happened? What did I feel? What happened? What did I feel? And whenever I wasn't sure what to write, I'm like, just tell the fucking truth. Because like, that's always the right answer. If you're trying to write something people want to read. Always. Tell the truth.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Like what you felt, not like, you know, the forensic police report truth. What happened? And then what did you feel? And if you do that.

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  Well, the emotional, the emotional truth trumps the facts every time.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  That's, that's what I mean.

• 1:12:23Rich Roll?

  If you have to hedge the actual facts in the timeline in order to, to get to a greater emotional truth, that's your job as a writer.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  No one cares about irrelevant facts.

• 1:12:33Rich Roll?

  And that's the only thing ultimately at the end of the day, that's, that's either gonna connect with somebody or not, you know? And, and I think, you know, we be, look, the internet has really, um, you know, ignited a new generation of people who have finely attuned radar for bullshit.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:48Rich Roll?

  It's like, they don't have time for ads. They, they're not gonna sit through anything and they can see from a mile away when someone's pitching them a bunch of nonsense. And so authenticity really is become more important than it ever has been. And that has to infuse, like if you're out there in the world, if you're a public figure and you're putting out content, if you're not being authentic to who you are, you know, whether that's everybody's cup of tea or not.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  People know.

• 1:13:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, people know immediately, right? And so, I mean, I faced that same thing when I wrote my first book, you know? I was writing, here I am like a, you know, this vegan, you know, ultra distance athlete, you know, and I'm writing this memoir about my life. At the same time, I knew that this guy Scott Jurick, who's like the world's most successful vegan ultra endurance athlete in the world, was writing his book at the same time. And I'm like, who's gonna read my book? You know, there's no reason to read my book whatsoever. You know? I've never even won a race. You know, it's like, what's the point?

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know that doesn't matter.

• 1:13:44Rich Roll?

  Right, so I, so, so I, but I realized, I said, you know, look, most sports memoirs are terrible. They're written to extend a brand and, and that's not to say that Scott's, you know, Scott's wrote a great book, so it's, it's not about him, but. I realized that the only way that anybody was going to care at all about anything I had to say was directly proportional to the extent to which I was willing to be emotionally raw, vulnerable, and honest, you know, and so I had to write it like I was writing a diary that no one was going to read, and that's a very frightening prospect, and that's something that I think a lot of people aren't willing to do, or that most writers don't understand.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:14:23Rich Roll?

  And it was very frightening when I turned my manuscript, and I remember turning to my wife and saying, "I hope I didn't just make the biggest mistake I've ever made." Like, it's terrifying to be so open in that regard, and, you know, the stories that you tell, you know, they're incredibly humorous, but they're, you know, it paints a very, you know, specific picture of a guy that, you know, is going to, you know very well, going to, you know, be on the receiving end of a lot of vitriol.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  I am, but the funny thing is, if you actually read the stories, I'm the loser in like half of them, you know, like people like, I can always tell if someone's read the stuff by their reaction, because if they're like, "Well, if the basic tenor of the questions is, 'You're not so great, why do you think you're so great?' I know they haven't read it," you know, if the basic tenor is like, "I love, I thought it was funny, like the storytelling, whatever," then it's like, I know they read it, because if you read it, I mean, how many stories, I shit myself in them, you know, like, I'm not the hero. Like, I tell the truth of what happened, and the real truth of any life is, sometimes you're amazing, sometimes you're awful, most of the time you're somewhere in between, and it's a tragic comedy, like, that's what life is, and that's what the stories are, but

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  like, the way the brand is projected, and part of this is absolutely my fault, the way the brand is projected is like, "Oh, look how awesome I am," just from the absolute surface area, but then you read it, and it's like, "Oh, wow."

• 1:15:45Rich Roll?

  Right, but you have like a shit-eating grin on the cover of your book, and it's like, you're inviting that.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Yes, oh, absolutely, no, of course, well, when I first started in media, my assumption was that facts mattered, people did research, people understood what they were talking about before they talked about it, which is ridiculous and naive.

• 1:16:01Rich Roll?

  Well, all you have to do is read the first article that gets written about you on the internet and realize how many factual errors are in it, and then you question Whether anything you ever read is true.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  You know what that's called? It's called the Murray Gell-Mann effect. Because the physicist, so the physicist, a really famous physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, he was talking about how he reads the paper. When he ever gets to the science section, he's like, he said almost exactly what you said. Every single thing in the science section is wrong. Even the things that are right are right for the wrong reasons. And he said, and I realized one day, I was turning the paper and I like laughed at the science stuff. And then I turned to the business section and I just started reading and assumed it was all true. And he said, wait a minute. If everything in the science section is wrong, why am I giving any credence to this section? I don't know whether it's true or not, but it must have the same editorial standards. And he said, he stopped reading the paper after that.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  It is, I'm sure you know, as well as I do, if you're an expert in any field, you know media gets everything wrong about it. Guess what? They're the same way about every other field.

• 1:17:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:14Rich Roll?

  It's so disappointing when you start to realize that most adults are just terrible at their job.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Dude, when I realized the adults weren't, no one was in charge. You know what it was, man? I feel like, you know, I feel like this might have happened to my friend and I just remembering it happening to me. But basically, the day I really understood this, I think I was in college. And it was like, I looked up the word bucket and the definition was like, it's a pale. And then I looked up like pale and the definition was it's a bucket. And I was like, what the, this, like seriously, it was like, no one's in charge. I think that like happened in class or something, my buddy. But it was like such a vivid thing where it was like, how is the, this is not an ordered universe we live in. It's just the, people put the illusion of it on, you know?

• 1:17:58Rich Roll?

  For comfort and security.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:18:00Rich Roll?

  Otherwise it's terrifying.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Well, it's better to, I, man, I've always played the, or been of the mind that it's like, it's better to recognize something for what it is and then adapt to it than pretend it's something it's not, and then suffer the sort of consequences of that, you know?

• 1:18:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  But not everyone's like that. Most people aren't like that.

• 1:18:21Rich Roll?

  I don't know. All right, so you do all this psychoanalysis.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:26Rich Roll?

  You've been able to make peace with your past, and we didn't even get into, I mean, you had, you know, maybe not the roughest upbringing, but, you know, certainly had your challenges.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Very, very typical, I think.

• 1:18:36Rich Roll?

  And it's pretty clear, like, when I was reading about some of the, you know, the circumstances under which you were raised, it's just not surprising that you behaved the way that you did in your twenties.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  You have narcissistic parents who, they weren't bad people, they were just bad parents, you know? They didn't, they just didn't care that much about their child. And, "I wasn't abused, I wasn't abandoned, I had plenty of food," it was nothing like that, right? It wasn't the narrative of abuse that, like, is easy to see. It's a narrative of abuse that, like, I think a lot of people suffer through and don't really realize it, and then they have shitty relationships when they're adult and they don't realize why, which is exactly my life, right? In fact, the lunch I was telling you about, we were talking about this, and like, right, no one hit me, no one sexually abused me, it was nothing like that. And if you met my dad, he's perfectly charming, you'd love to have dinner with him, right?

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  But you're a smart dude, you would see it, not everyone does. It's like, "Oh yeah, I wouldn't want to be this dude's son," you know, like, he's a performer, he's not a human, he doesn't connect with people, right? And that's fine if you don't have kids, but if you have a kid, then it's like, well, what's your kid gonna do, you know? And there's ways to deal with that.

• 1:19:47Rich Roll?

  But your parents divorced when you were really young, right?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  A year and a half or something.

• 1:19:49Rich Roll?

  Like, dad kinda wasn't around until much later.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  I mean, right, he, but even when he was around, he wasn't around, you know, he was, my parents are boomers, and they are like, they could be the dictionary definition of boomers, and the boomers are like the dumbest generation of narcissists the history of the planet's ever seen, and my parents fit squarely in the center of that. They are so boomer, it's ridicu- They met at one of George Young's coke parties in Manhattan Beach. That's how boomer they are. Seriously dude, my mom was a flight attendant for Pan Am and my dad was like a stockbroker.

• 1:20:21Rich Roll?

  Oh my god.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:20:23Rich Roll?

  Right out of that movie Blow.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  It is seriously, they they met at like one of his uh things in Manhattan Beach. And so like um they're not evil at all, they're not, they're just sad, broken people who shouldn't have had kids. Um yeah, and so it was, I had a shitty childhood only in that it was like um lonely. Uh I mean I had friends, like I wasn't like some social outcast, but I didn't, I didn't have a family unit. I didn't have that sort of stuff. And yeah, I didn't really, I knew all, none of this was news to me, right? So it's not like no repressed memory, I mean I got it. You don't really, I think it's very easy to just be like, oh, so what? It doesn't matter. Yeah, I get it, whatever, you don't need to cry about it. It's easy to disassociate from that.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  And that was a lot, I think a lot what analysis did is connect me to those emotions and really start to understand how those, those created sort of patterns of reaction, you know, to things.

• 1:21:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Like why, you, I have an anger problem. Why do you get angry? Because anger is much easier. And not everyone is this, but for a lot of people, it's much easier to be angry than it is to be sad.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  Anger, anger is essentially a defense against sadness, can be.

• 1:21:33Rich Roll?

  Well, behind, I mean, when you break it down and you peel back all the layers, it always goes down to fear. You know, fear is behind pretty much all of it.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:42Rich Roll?

  So if you get angry, if you get angry, you know, what's behind the anger?

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Uh what's, for my case, I think most, uh often, sometimes fear, absolutely, like you're afraid of, of whatever. But for, I feel like for me it was sadness, you know, it was like um, it was easy to be sort of like uh angry instead of being sad. My, my wife is like um uh very intuitive and very emotionally intelligent. And she even calls me on this now, like she's like, something will happen, I'll get angry and she's, she'll kind of look at me and she's like, you can feel sad, it's okay. And I'm like, and then I get even more angry because I know she's right, you know, like she only, she doesn't do it every time.

• 1:22:22Rich Roll?

  Doesn't give you the rush that anger.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  No, of course not. And with the feeling of power or control, like um it it's funny, she um she's really uh. I I after getting married, I totally understood the saying, I forget who it was, some English guy said like, you know, um. Were it not for women civilize, men would be naked apes grunting in caves, like women are so civilizing. Like I I used to get so angry driving, right? Which is like, not not road rage, but just like scream at someone, you fucking idiot, cut me off, whatever. And so um she looked at me one day and she's like, okay, from now, you're not gonna do that anymore. Like you have a son in the back, right? You don't want him to learn how to, you know, like how to deal with emotions like this. And I'm like, yeah, of course you're right. And so she's like, here's what you're gonna do.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  When you're angry, when you feel like screaming, I want you to yell out, I'm very angry. So like, and so of course I'm like.

• 1:23:14Rich Roll?

  You can't do that without laughing.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  Right, that's the point. You're you're precisely correct. So like, someone will cut me off and like she'll see me grip the wheel and she's like, I'm. I'm very angry. And then like you can hear me, I laugh in the middle of it because it's so ridiculous.

• 1:23:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like out of a Will Ferrell movie.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  It is. And so like uh like um yeah, like that's that's sort of like um. I'm learning those sorts of like it's that's more of a cognitive behavioral thing, but like small things like that are are sort of what.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  What I'm starting to understand and and kind of how I'm starting to connect that with myself, you know, like. But why did I used to do that? I think a lot of times as a kid especially is like, it's when when your life is so sad. It's sadness is overwhelming, you can't almost you have to push that away. That's what post traumatic stress is. That's why I'm not trying to compare myself to a soldier in combat because it's ridiculous, but that's why.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  That's what post traumatic stress is. Overwhelming emotional reactions are pushed down by the brain because they will freeze it up. On on a very real level. And so it basically stores that up. Um until you can process it safely and then it brings it back up. And that's not like hokey new age nonsense talk. That's that's that's. I mean, the clearest day. That's the science, that's how it works. Uh, and so, it works, this combat, the mechanism that work, that happens in combat is no different than a child feeling lonely and sad and scared because his parents aren't around. Same mechanism, your brain doesn't distinguish between the differences, even though objectively they're different, extremely different.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Uh, the brain creates a reaction to them the same, just like, um, I mean, any numbers situation, a guy being made fun of by like a girl, a hot girl rejecting him feels a huge amount of trauma and stress, even if you know objectively it's not a big deal.

• 1:25:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:25:05Rich Roll?

  Well, he's associating that with, you know, being unworthy, being unlovable, like all these things are primal that go back to, you know, probably how he interacted with his mom. You know, all that kind of stuff, right? So, the more kind of self-realization that you have around these issues, I mean, you can look back on the decisions that you've made, you know, throughout that period of your life, and it's like, of course, of course, of course I did that. I almost couldn't have made a different choice, you know, but now you have the ability and the control and the aptitude and this toolbox to sort of, uh, uninstall those buttons, or maybe not.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Learn different habits and stuff.

• 1:25:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but like, install new buttons.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:25:44Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Uh, that's the goal, man, is I try to get better at like, um, how I, how I, I try to see my emotions a little bit before they over, overtake me.

• 1:25:56Rich Roll?

  Right, that's what I meant about the, the, the road signs, you know, when you can kind of see it coming.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  That's, exactly.

• 1:26:01Rich Roll?

  Cause once it picks up steam, like, forget about it.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  Can't stop it.

• 1:26:04Rich Roll?

  It's a done deal, right? So, being able to identify it early on, the earlier you can see it, then you have that ability to pause and, and make a different choice.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  And you're not disassociating from it, you're recognizing it's there. Like, you don't stop the emotion or control the emotion, that's impossible, you just recognize it, you give it space and you don't react to it, you know? You can decide not to react to it if you see it, understand it, but you can't control it, like pushing anger down, it's like, you can't hold a lid on a boiling pot.

• 1:26:31Rich Roll?

  No, you just, hey, this is how I'm feeling right now, and like, embrace it and accept it and try to like, work through it, rather than avoid it or repress it. Those are different things, right? And that becomes like, kind of ephemeral in how you do that, but that's where the work is, right?

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:26:45Rich Roll?

  So, uh- So I want to get into like how important it is to have, you know, a healthy mate who can be that sounding board. I mean, in my experience, obviously, it sounds like you have that, you know, and that's been instrumental in my life.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bird was telling me your wife is like amazing.

• 1:27:02Rich Roll?

  She's incredible. She's just, she has laser ability to see right through me and know exactly what's going on and, and know the best way of, of addressing it, you know, not in a, I think when people hear that, they think, oh, it's like a nag thing. It's not that at all. It's just, it's that capacity to like, really like objectively understand what's happening and, and kind of navigate the situation accordingly.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  There's, I don't think, in my, I don't think there's anything better in life, having someone who fully understands and has the measure of you, but still accepts you. That's, that's the whole, that's what a great relationship is. I know you and I love you.

• 1:27:41Rich Roll?

  Exactly. I know you and I love you. That's like. And here's what's going on. Here's what you're doing, you know, and you've did it the other day, you know, and like what's going on? How can we, you know, how can we find a different way?

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  It's fine. I, I like, I do a podcast now and I have a book coming out that's like sort of sex and dating advice for young guys. And I, I say, like, guys all the time have questions. Most of their questions that they think about are sex and dating are not really. They're like emotional problems that the guy has that he doesn't realize he's projecting onto girls, which I used to do all the time too. So like, I, I don't say in a judgment, but so much of this, I, I'm like, listen, guys, if you want to sleep with a lot of girls, cool, no problem. If you want to act like this, you can. I'm just telling you though, you're eventually going to figure out what I figured out. That, you know, these sorts of relationships are, are optimal, not just because, it's not like an, like an optimization efficiency thing. It's because this is the best, like, this is the most rewarding,

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  most satisfying, for a reason. People end up pairing off for reasons. It's not like, marriage might be a social construct, but pair bonding is not, you know, and, and I kind of like try and walk guys through that. Not like you need to go pair bond at 24 if you're not ready. No, but just understand like this is where you're going to go if you do it right. And this is where you're going to end up. And it's okay.

• 1:28:57Rich Roll?

  And to be clear, that's very different from, you know, the billion dollar industry of, you know, trying to, you know, teach guys how to, you know, pick up girls and

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  The worst. I hate them.

• 1:29:07Rich Roll?

  It's like you cannot

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  The worst.

• 1:29:08Rich Roll?

  Hack your way into a relationship. And the typical relationship paradigm is, you know, two people get together, there's some level of mutual attraction there.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:17Rich Roll?

  And then each person projects onto the other person their idealized version of them that comes with all that baggage and all of that. And, and each person tries to sustain that or live up to it for a certain amount of time until

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Or they lie to themselves. Oh, he's actually a good guy.

• 1:29:32Rich Roll?

  So inevitably, you know, the truth comes out, the veneer cracks.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  And they're angry.

• 1:29:37Rich Roll?

  Their real, the real version of who they are is, is demonstrated. And then those people are either going to be able to work through that or they're not. And usually they can't or they don't. Right? And so the, the, the key and kind of what I've seen, you know, in listening to your podcast a little bit, and, uh, you know, I'm somewhat familiar with the new book. I read The Proposal. Bird sent me The Proposal. And, you know, I'm excited for that to come out, is you're cutting through all of that and saying, look, it's not about that, man. You gotta do the inside work. Like, you're not gonna, it's not about 10 tips or tricks or tools. Like, it's exactly what you had to experience to get to this place. And, you know, and there is kind of a hilarious, like, inherent irony in that you have transitioned from being, you know, the frat tire guy into the guy who's gonna now, uh, sort of

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  Teach guys how to be good men.

• 1:30:25Rich Roll?

  How to be good men, you know what I mean?

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Seriously?

• 1:30:27Rich Roll?

  But that's the beautiful arc of your life. And I think that that's, you know, that's almost poetic and literary in its own way.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  You, if you wrote this script out, people would be like, ah, it's too hack. It's too cliched.

• 1:30:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, the guy who does that is gonna now do this. Like, that would never happen.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  But you know what's funny is that it

• 1:30:45Rich Roll?

  You must get some heat for that.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Eh, I mean, you get heat for everything, man. The only way you don't get heat is to stay out of the kitchen, but you gotta eat, right? So I'm going in the kitchen. This is the way it works. Um, like, uh, the funny thing is, man, it's, I didn't orchestrate it like this. It's just like, so many guys come to me for advice about sex and dating and like, I, I, it's not even that I'm that much of an expert. I just figured out, I think, what most guys who really put in the work figure out by the time they hit forty. And then I paired up with Dr. Jeff Miller, who's like the F psych expert and really understands like a lot of the sort of deep science but between like, behind what I intuited. And then after that, man, it was just explaining fundamentals to guys. The vast majority of what we teach is stuff like, if you want women to like you, you have to be attractive

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  to women. Like, seriously, like, you're like, looking at me like, that can't be it. It is. And like, what does attraction mean? It means being clean. It means being in shape. It means, uh, being intelligent. It means being kind. And like, what does kindness look like? No, it doesn't mean weakness. It doesn't mean being a doormat. It means these things, right? What is, uh, women like strong guys. What does strong mean? It means the, it doesn't mean abuse. It doesn't mean posturing. It means, you know, capability. It means, uh, uh, you know, sort of like effectiveness. It means whatever. Like, really foundational, fundamental stuff. But the sad reality is our society does, totally fails at teaching

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  people anything, I think, about relationships. And it really fails at teaching men, I think, how to be, um, attractive to women in a way that is both, um, rewarding for men and also gives women what they want.

• 1:32:25Rich Roll?

  And how to functionally interact with women in a healthy way.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  No instruction, right.

• 1:32:29Rich Roll?

  So, and so, you know, looking at this arc, you know, it's sort of like, you know, earlier Tucker, um, you know, on some level, you know, narcissistic and, and maybe broken perhaps in certain respects.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  In certain ways, it's true.

• 1:32:43Rich Roll?

  And, you know, entertaining in that regard, but, but certainly, you know, kind of understanding what was really going on with you. And, and then bridging this gap to becoming empathetic, right? And understanding that, oh, you know, this Person actually comes with a heart and a history and a life and friends and family.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  To be empathetic, you've got to first understand yourself.

• 1:33:01Rich Roll?

  And that's terrifying, because then you're taking responsibility for somebody else's emotional well-being. And that's very scary.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  You can't be selfish anymore.

• 1:33:09Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? And if you're not empathetic, you don't have to deal with that, right? And then you can

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  And you don't have to deal with your own emotions.

• 1:33:15Rich Roll?

  Abandon, and that will take you where it's gonna take you. But I think that the idea of engaging somebody on that kind of a deep level is frightening. You know, I don't know.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  No, I hadn't thought of it that way. What you just said is the empathy part. Like, part of being empathetic is not just recognizing the other person's emotions but your own. So it's really, if you don't want to connect with your own emotions, one of the best ways to not do it is to not connect with other people's either. This is like, totally basic. I just hadn't thought about it like that.

• 1:33:47Rich Roll?

  If you want to get familiar with your own personal character defects, like get into a relationship, because they will come to the surface really quick.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:33:55Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was funny.

• 1:33:57Rich Roll?

  And you don't have to do that if you avoid relationships. So that's a comfortable place of being.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. Which is, you sound like my fucking analyst now. She's like, and she's right, it just like, it sort of frustrates me when, not when she's right, it just frustrates me when like, I have to face things I pushed off for a long time. Like, part of the reason that I probably had a lot of relationships with a lot of different women is because then you don't have to have a deep one with anyone, you know? And part of it is because having sex with a lot of women is awesome, but then on some level, it just is, unarguably. But then on the other level, it's also like, I don't have to deal with my problems if I have a new girl every week, you know? Because we never get to my problems. It's funny, like, when I met my wife, like the first week or two.

• 1:34:44Rich Roll?

  Same thing with gambling or anything, you know? Substances, shopping, television.

• 1:34:50Rich Roll?

  Food.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  It it's running away from uh from pain or issues or whatever you don't want to face.

• 1:34:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's it's it's it's so easy that you could, I mean, like so much of what people do now. So much is social, a great critique of social media and and that sort of stuff that I think is absolutely true. Is this sort of enforced busyness. Oh, I'm so busy. No, you don't. You had yoga and then you had like a spin class and then you were on Twitter for an hour, right? It's just like you feel like you're busy because you're it's a great way to run away from things you don't want to face. Even just basic low level emotions like we're saying a minute ago. It's hard to sit in a room with yourself for 30 minutes. Have you seen there's great studies about this? People would rather take electric shock shocks than sitting alone in a room alone by themselves for five minutes.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Like it's tons of empirical data about this, not even meditating, dude, just sitting in the room alone. With nothing would rather take electric shock.

• 1:35:45Rich Roll?

  Terrifying because then you're with yourself. And what are you going to do that?

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  You gotta face it.

• 1:35:49Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? And and the road gets narrower. So, you know, you've done the analysis. You've become very aware of of, you know, how you function in relationships. And then it forces you to then look at other aspects of your life. How am I using social media? How am I using food? How am I using my body? What's my relationship to television?

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  My career.

• 1:36:10Rich Roll?

  Workaholism, all these sorts of things because they can all be be very similarly used and abused to exit or escape from whatever it is you probably should be working through.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  I put off analysis, I think, for six months when I was finishing my last Fratire book. It is sort of subconscious, but I honestly think it was one of those things where I knew if I didn't finish that book before I started analysis, I might never finish it.

• 1:36:32Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, you can't. Once you go into analysis, then you'd be like, why am I writing this book?

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  That's the that's the question. And if you don't want to face it, it's like, you know, and so I really did put it off for like part of it was I was I didn't want to start, you know, like anything hard, you don't ever want to start.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  But I think another part was like. I didn't like, I was afraid and it probably wouldn't, I I I might have used an excuse to not fail. It might have been like a double sort of excuse thing, but yeah, I was, I was like, you know, it was sort of like the same. Augustine quote like give me, Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet, you know?

• 1:37:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  It was like one of those things for me, I think, um, yeah, cause like as soon as you're, as soon as you're starting reflecting, then you have to ask yourself, why am I doing this?

• 1:37:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  Like, what's the, you know, and?

• 1:37:18Rich Roll?

  I'm not quite ready to ask myself that question.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  I don't want, I don't want, well, I can ask it, I just don't want to answer it yet, you know? And then when you're in analysis, that's part of the, the cool thing about analysis is that it's a relationship with someone else where you're accountable. And it's like ostensibly it's someone who's very intelligent, who knows you very well. And so they, in a lot of ways, they act as a mirror, but it's non judgmental. It's not like a great analyst, um, is someone who bounces you back to yourself, but in a way that you can handle and see.

• 1:37:48Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Right? Um, and yeah, that, that should be the point, um, if it works right.

• 1:37:55Rich Roll?

  Speaking of your relationship with work, you have some new stuff coming up, right? Like you've got book in a box, I want to talk about that a little bit, which is pretty cool.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:04Rich Roll?

  You know, as somebody who's, you know, put out two books, um, you know, I've had my experiences in traditional publishing and, and, uh, you know, the solutions that you're offering and the options for people out there, I think is, you know, a much needed service in, in this, in this, in this world, you know? In many ways, uh, you know, old school publishing is, is broken and it's ripe for, uh, two point O. And new ways and means of approaching it. And I think what you're doing is pretty interesting.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically I, I have a company called Book in a Box and the whole thing started on, but not almost by accident, it was by accident. This people, you know what's obnoxious is 10 years, people have been asking me, how do I, how do I do a book? Right? And then I tell them, we have to write it and they roll their eyes and like, no one wants, uh, to write a book because writing a book is really hard. Right? Uh, and so of course my view was always like.

• 1:38:54Rich Roll?

  They want it, but they don't want to put the work in.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  Right, that was like my view and it was a, uh, but I kind of went a little further, I think. Even though I hate this snooty literary elitist, I still had that attitude that was like, well, if you really want it, you'll sit down and do it and you'll put in the work and blah, blah, blah, right?

• 1:39:10Rich Roll?

  It is a litmus test.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  If you wanna be a writer, if you wanna be a writer, that's true. Absolutely. If you want to be uh someone who crafts, who takes ideas and and uses words to express them and crafts them, absolutely true. There's no way around that, right? But uh what I realized was you you don't have to be a writer to have a book. They're different things, you know? Being a writer is fantastic, but it's a craft. It it's sort of like um you don't have to win marathon, you don't have to be a marathoner to go running, right? You can go run for fun, for exercise, whatever, totally fine. You don't have to be a marathoner. It it's sort of a similar metaphor. You don't have to be a writer to have a book. A lot of people have a lot of great ideas and amazing knowledge and wisdom they should share with the world,

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  and they don't have the time or ability or desire to ever write it down. And I realized this crystal clear, this one woman, uh this brilliant entrepreneur I met at this entrepreneur dinner thing in New York, and she's like, I I've had people ask me to write a book for ten years about what I do. I don't have time. Um, can you help me uh sort of turn my uh knowledge into a book? And I was like, well, you have to write it. And she's like, you know, I gave a standard answer and she's like, kind of rolls her eyes, and then I started lecturing her about hard work, right? Like, you know, like I'm teaching this woman who's done ten times more than me in life uh uh about what it takes to do things. And so she stops me and she's like, Tucker, um, are you an entrepreneur? And I'm like, yeah, I like to think I am. She's like, well, I I am definitely.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  And uh what I do in my job is I solve people's problems. Do you do that or do you just lecture people? And I was like, oh, it was a total gut punch because she was a hundred percent right. So it was like, I went home and I was like, okay, how do I solve a problem? And then I, it it's one of these things I could have done eight years ago if I wasn't an arrogant shit. Uh, basically, I realized to get her ideas out of her head and into a book, all I had to do was essentially translate it. And so it was like, I figured out a way with my co-founder Zach uh to sort of create uh to talk to her, create an outline, right? Figure out what the book was gonna be about, who the audience is, all the things you have to think about first if you're really doing a good book. And then from from that outline, we got someone uh to interview her, like a professional journalist to interview her,

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  get everything out of her head about her subject, right? She's a book about retail, pop-up retail. And then we got the recorded, it was about eight hours on the phone, transcribed that, took the transcription. If you've ever read a transcription like of this podcast, it's really hard to read. Any sort of, you can listen to things, it's great. You can't read them, right? Because they're different mediums. So then we just had an editor essentially translate it from audio transcripts into book prose. Same ideas, same words, everything. And she's like, this is amazing. These are my thoughts exactly. This is perfectly, this is right. Public, you know, did cover everything, published it. It's done amazing.

• 1:42:00Rich Roll?

  So it's sort of, I mean, on some level, there's a ghostwriting aspect to it, although I wouldn't characterize it as ghostwriting. I mean, it's really

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  No, it's not ghostwriting at all.

• 1:42:08Rich Roll?

  ...of being able to put every aspect of the book together for somebody and put it out there, including designing the cover and like everything.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  Ghostwriting is someone else, you tell them, write a book on sales. It's their ideas on sales, and then you're paying them to put your name on it. Our clients pay us fifteen grand, so we're not cheap, but you're never gonna find a good ghostwriter for fifteen grand. Ghostwriters start at like fifty, right, fifty or more.

• 1:42:31Rich Roll?

  Or like a huge percentage of, you know, for big books, a huge percentage of the advance.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. So what we're doing is taking your ideas or the author's ideas and just translating them. That's it. Like, we don't add content. We're not doing the thinking for them. Like, this book is, she has a very unique perspective about pop-up retail, which I don't know, I don't care, I don't know anything about pop-up retail, right? But people who care, care a lot. And so like, the editor's job was not to write about pop-up retail. It was, the interviewer got everything on her head, and the editor's job is to make it flow well on the page, but it's her words, her ideas, her everything, you know?

• 1:43:10Rich Roll?

  And it retain, she retains all the intellectual property, right?

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, she owns the royalties.

• 1:43:14Rich Roll?

  You're not like a publisher where suddenly you're participating in...

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  She owns everything. She owns the royalties, she owns the rights, she owns everything. Like, her book is a great example. She's only sold five hundred copies, but she's done a couple million dollars in business. She signed a huge deal with like the biggest mall, or the second biggest mall company in the country, you know, because she's in retail. And she's keynoting like three conferences this year. Like and her book is for the people that care about pop up resale, her book has become the Bible. It is like the thing and because it that's most fields, most fields, professional fields especially, have all this inborn sort of tacit knowledge and it never gets written down. Because if you have a field where the practitioners make money, you're making money.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  You're not writing books about it and a lot of times fields change quickly and they don't, you know, I don't want to like give my secrets away or whatever, right? So if you're trying to get into sort of pop up retail, you have no idea where to start, nothing, right? Her book has become the Bible already in like six months since it's been out. Because she's the first person who ever put all these ideas down, right? And I feel like honestly, like not to get all like, um, whatever preachy or pitchy or something. But like, I feel like, um, there's so much knowledge and wisdom in the world. You feel like there's so much content, most of it's bullshit. And the stuff that should be written down is not because most of the people that are really fucking smart

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  and really talented and doing amazing things are too busy doing it to write it.

• 1:44:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and they're not writers.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. Very, there's a small crossover between people who write and people who have great things to say. There's a tiny crossover and those that crossover are great books. But most writers don't have anything to fucking say and a ton of people have a lot to say, aren't writers and will never take the time to write.

• 1:45:06Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  So what's their solution?

• 1:45:08Rich Roll?

  So your, your client or your customer is a very specific person. Like for me personally, like there's no way that I could imagine like having somebody else.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  You're a writer.

• 1:45:16Rich Roll?

  Books because that's what I do.

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  No, you shouldn't, yeah.

• 1:45:18Rich Roll?

  That would just make me insane. Like I just couldn't imagine that.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:45:20Rich Roll?

  And I'm sure you couldn't either, but, but for somebody who's a CEO of a business and they're looking at their book not as, you know, some great piece of, you know, literature or high art, but as kind of a lead generator or.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  Or a way to pass on their knowledge.

• 1:45:37Rich Roll?

  A way to pass on their knowledge and also to kind of substantiate your level of.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Authority, credibility. Exactly, exactly. You know, honestly, the way I like to think about this is, um. So in antiquity, there was the Library of Alexandria, which the Egyptians, for a thousand years, collected every piece of knowledge, not just from their kingdom, but from Greece and Rome and everywhere, right? And the Library of Alexandria was this legendary building, where supposedly every piece of human knowledge was in there, like how to grow, you know, sort of grapes in Corsica and all this stuff, right? And then Julius Caesar burned it down to make a point to Cleopatra, and we lost a thousand years of human knowledge, gone, right? I feel like Google does an amazing job at cataloging information, not at knowledge.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  And I feel like we don't have the tools. We could rebuild the Library of Alexandria, but we need the tools. Because people aren't, people aren't gonna sit down and do this. But if you make it easy on them, for, to them to organize their information into knowledge and to record it in a way that other people can use, that's a serious sort of service. That's, that's what makes me excited about this. Like, selling fifteen thousand dollar packages is like, man, who fucking cares, right? Like, that's just transactions for money. Like, I'm not trying to, like, promote someone's speaking career. If that happens, that's great. What I care about is, like, creating a process where the knowledge and wisdom of humanity can be recorded and shared. That's super powerful.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  I, I would guess that ninety percent of the books we do won't really matter, but we're gonna do, hopefully, ten percent. Maybe even if it's only, only oh one percent of the books we do end up making a difference. Almost none of these books would exist without us, right? Or without this process. Like, we have a book coming out, describes our exact process. We're gonna sell it for basically nothing, two nine nine, or give it away free. Yeah, their books, that would have never happened otherwise. Right, because I feel like, teach, I'll, I'll show the world how to do this. I don't care, like, people who are gonna hire us are hiring us because they have money and no time. The knowledge is fine. I want people to do this because I feel like there's, there's a huge group of people who should be sharing their knowledge and aren't. Think about it. How amazing would it be if we had Joan of Arc's memoirs?

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  No, seriously.

• 1:47:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Like, I mean, like, wouldn't that be awesome? The one of the great books ever written is Anne Frank's Diary. It exists by accident. Right? Uh, uh, just because this poor girl was locked in a closet, had nothing else to do in an attic, had nothing else to do, wrote down everything she was thinking and feeling when the Nazis were occupying the Netherlands. And it's like this amazing book that has changed millions of lives, and it basically exists by accident. How much of that shit have we lost in history? A lot. Right? The technology now exists for us to lose none of it. And most of it might be worthless, but the stuff that isn't is amazing. And that, books change history. Books change how people think and how they interact with each other. How many books, what books, what books have had an impact on you, dude? That's probably why you write, right?

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Is because books change. Same with me, man.

• 1:48:42Rich Roll?

  Of course. So, you know, there's a difference between knowledge and information.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:48:46Rich Roll?

  In today's age, information is disposable, it's instantaneous, it's unreliable.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  Totally different than knowledge.

• 1:48:52Rich Roll?

  You know, knowledge is a different thing. And there's still something really special, even though we are in this disposable age about a book. You know, a book is, a book is a way of affirming, um, permanence in some regard, you know, and the tangible.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Yes, as a social object, yes. But it, I'm not even talking about digital versus physical, which is a different discussion. And I actually agree with you. I like physical books. I have 3,000 on my plate. I love them. So, I'm, I'm, I like digital, I like both, actually. To me, they're not contradictory. But like, I'm talking more about like, yes, turning, our process is really good at turning information into knowledge. If you just want to record information, then just talk about it. Uh, you don't need us, you can just dictate and then get it transcribed, uh, use Speech Pad. Don't use this, right? If you just want to vomit onto a page, you don't need book in a box or the process. The process is about, the way we go through is, like, the first question we ask is, what's your goal? Second question is, who's your audience?

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  And the third is, um, how are you helping their, or your audience reach their goals? Because that's what makes a great book, is you delivering value in your book that the audience connects with and needs. Right? Otherwise, it's just like. Oh, I'm gonna tell you how awesome I am. No one gives a shit and there's too many of those crappy books.

• 1:50:06Rich Roll?

  Right, but on some level, you recognize the difference between a book about, you know, pop-ups and that business and you trying to mine your emotional truth in the book.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  Totally different books.

• 1:50:17Rich Roll?

  You know, that's a different animal.

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  Totally different books. I don't think I could write my book in this process, my book. But we actually do have someone who's coming through, who's very similar, it's a woman, who has like lots of funny stories and she's actually using our process. And I think it's working actually really well for her because she is funny, she's a decent storyteller and the process forces her to like, the way we do it is we make people really focus on what they're saying that matters to their audience, right? That's knowledge. What do I know that you would find valuable? That's what we put in books. We try to make them about that, right?

• 1:51:00Rich Roll?

  I sent a friend of mine to you guys.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  Who?

• 1:51:02Rich Roll?

  Khalil Rafati.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  Oh dude, we're having lunch with Khalil tomorrow.

• 1:51:06Rich Roll?

  Oh, you are?

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, his book is, we just finished his manuscript.

• 1:51:09Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  We're actually delivering it to him in person tomorrow.

• 1:51:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, very cool.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  You sent it. I thought Neil Strauss sent us.

• 1:51:14Rich Roll?

  No, well, I mean, I gave him the idea. Maybe he's friends with Neil, I don't know.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he is friends.

• 1:51:19Rich Roll?

  So maybe Neil is the one who pushed him over the top, but like, I had a lot of conversation with Khalil.

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like a...

• 1:51:25Rich Roll?

  He's been on my podcast.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  He's had an amazing life.

• 1:51:27Rich Roll?

  Well, his story is insane.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:51:29Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Heroin addict, like now he runs organic juice stuff and he's like an amazing, and it's so funny.

• 1:51:35Rich Roll?

  Are you going to Sun Life?

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're going tomorrow to his place. Yeah, he's an amazing, I think his book is actually gonna be really good. He's got a story I think will resonate with a lot of people. It's very...

• 1:51:47Rich Roll?

  You should listen to my podcast interview.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  With him?

• 1:51:49Rich Roll?

  He's amazing. Yeah, I mean, the way he can tell his story and his, I mean, talk about an arc, I mean, it's unbelievable.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  It is. It genuinely is like, it was like, when I looked at the outline, I'm like, this can't be real.

• 1:52:02Rich Roll?

  But Khalil, you know, and this is not disparaging at all because I love him to death, but he's like a very ADHD guy. Like, he's a moving target, like, he just can't sit still. So there's no way, like, initially I'm saying, here's how I think you should open your book and here's what I think you should make sure that you're focusing on thematically. And I'm just like, he's never gonna write this book.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:52:25Rich Roll?

  It's never gonna happen.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  It never would happen without us.

• 1:52:26Rich Roll?

  And that's a shame, you know, because he really does have such an incredible story that is, could empower

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  Khalil's the fire.

• 1:52:32Rich Roll?

  inspire a lot of people.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  It is, seriously. He's the perfect example of someone who's perfect for our process.

• 1:52:37Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  You know, like, the other example I give is Malcolm X is like, basically, him and Alex Haley use this process. Not, not literally, of course, not like, but like, the idea that you can use the spoken word and a well structured interview to lay the foundation for the book, um, is something that has been done over and over through history.

• 1:52:56Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Uh, it's just no one has made it systematic and made that, that knowledge sort of almost algorithmic and checklist so that anyone can follow it, you know? That's really the only thing we've done. We didn't invent, like, using talking as a basis for books. God knows.

• 1:53:11Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  We didn't, or, you know, or the republic wouldn't exist, you know?

• 1:53:15Rich Roll?

  How many books have you guys done?

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Uh, we're, we're at client sixty right now, I think.

• 1:53:20Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:21Rich Roll?

  Profitable from the get-go.

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  Uh huh, oh yeah.

• 1:53:23Rich Roll?

  And it basically, like, in terms of scaling this, like, you're just dependent upon this network of independent contractor editors and, and people like that, right? So, you know, as you grow, you're gonna, you have to grow that network, obviously.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, what we do is, we've, we've actually found some amazing freelance, there's so many high, uh, really, like, highly talented, sort of artistic, creative people, because the way the world is changing, it's not that necessarily there's no jobs for them, it's just that people who are used to a certain type of job, like journalists, right? Like, um, some of them don't adapt well, right? But what we've done is, we've, we don't just say, hey, here's a, an ex-journalist, go have fun. Like, we have a very systematic process where, like, we have a different person outline them. Our outliners, so our main outliner is this guy, Mark Chait, we just hired full-time. He was a senior editor at Penguin and executive editor Harper Collins. We have another guy who's a senior editor at a different publishing house, or used to be, who, those two do our main outlines.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  And they're, I mean, they're so amazing at taking, sitting down with people and getting out of them what really matters, right? Like, what they really should be talking about, what the book should be really about. So, it's not just like- Hey, what do you want to write about? Part of our job is helping those people figure out what the most interesting thing about themselves is, you know, to reach their goal, right? And so we do the outline. So Che, or the guy. The outline is so key. Oh, do we spend three hours on the phone with them and then probably another 10 to 12 hours off, our outliner does, getting it right, right? And if your outline isn't tight, you're done. It's a disaster. It's a disaster. We've had one client, we screwed up the outline and it was my fault, actually. And it's been so much work getting everything fixed.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  And then once we have the outline, then we have like, man, former Washington Post reporters and so many really talented people. We do everything in between. And so all we do is we connect like the journalist or the editors, what we call the position, with them and then they schedule like four or five calls. And then they just go down the outline. And they're like, okay, this seems, so tell me about this story. And then blah, blah, blah. And then they keep, it's their job to ask questions until they feel like everything is out of this person's head about this subject, right? And so like, you know, we give them some outline or some general structure, but you don't need to teach people who spent 10 years covering the Department of Defense, how to like probe and ask questions. They know what they're doing, right? So we just hire like really great people and we test them, you know, and stuff.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  And then once we know they're good, then, and that's all they, all they do is ask questions. And then we do all the transcribing and then we send it back to that same person with the transcription sections, the relevant ones plugged into the outline. So it's whatever, 60,000 words. And all they have to do is go through and just make the sentences into something that flows on the page. So the editors, it's a really easy job for them. And like, we first tell them, it's like, oh, this seems hard. And then they do it and they're like, man, I did 4,000 words today. Like, you can't write 4,000 original words in a day and make them good. But editing the fast sort of edit of other people's words is no problem. And so it actually ends up going like. No problem, you know, like we, we, we have turned out, listen, our process is not foolproof

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  in that garbage in, garbage out. If you have a really stupid idea, then we're gonna produce a well-structured, beautiful book that is full of stupid ideas. If it's a great idea, though, it's a great book.

• 1:56:44Rich Roll?

  If the, you know, quote-unquote "author" isn't good at conveying their ideas, or isn't a good storyteller, or isn't clear on what they're trying to express, then there's not much that you can do with them.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you what, yes and no. If they don't have any ideas, or they don't have any stories, or they don't have anything to say, you're right, there's nothing we can do.

• 1:57:01Rich Roll?

  Why are they writing a book, then?

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  They shouldn't be. We, we turn down, um, uh, listen, uh, we're not trying to like not make money, but we turn down about 10% of the people who come to us, either because they're-

• 1:57:11Rich Roll?

  Well, the CEO of every business probably wants a book, doesn't mean they have anything to say.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  Uh, uh, we try, yes, yes and no. So, our job is, if they have nothing to say, if they're literally like, "I just want a book," then we, we don't do ghostwriting. We refer them to ghostwriters, and people come to us like that all the time. Like, "I don't really have anything to say, I just need a book to get tenure," or whatever. It's like, "Okay, here's a list of seven ghostwriters that we know that are really great, go deal with them."

• 1:57:36Rich Roll?

  Let's just pause there for a minute, though, because just that statement alone, like, makes my skin crawl. Because there's this idea that, like, you know, books are not, you know, books don't really have that much value, they're just these lead generators, and I just need the credibility. And it makes me crazy, because I know how much I've poured into my books, and I'm sure you feel the same way.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Well, that's why you sell books, though, dude. And people listen to you.

• 1:57:57Rich Roll?

  It's almost, uh, it's such a, it's such a disrespect for what it is, on some level.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, those people don't matter, man. I don't, I just don't think about it, I don't worry about it. We push those people to ghostwriters, and it's, "Okay, great, have fun." Well, we've found, actually, a lot of people come to us, and they're worried that, "Well, I don't know," they say, "I don't know if I have enough for a book." And we're like, "Okay, let's do the first outline call. Uh, if nothing comes out of it, no big deal, you don't owe us any money, we, no problem." And so, like, the first call is basically risk-free, and it's fine for us, too, because we don't mind that spending that, that part, uh, money, because we don't wanna do a shitty book either, right? Uh, and so, what we find, though, if you're, if you're 40, 50, 60- And you've been a professional for twenty, thirty, forty years, you know shit. You may not know what's interesting to other people and you might not know about what.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  You might not know what you should say in your book because you don't know what audiences will react to. That's our job to understand, okay, what you know here is very valuable. If your book is, we, almost anyone who's a professional who knows how to do something, we can pull a really good book. We just have to make it narrow and specific. So, you know, like it, we have one guy who come, who came through, um, a plumbing contractor. And like, what are you gonna write a book about, right? Actually, so our outliner like talked to him for like an hour about plumbing and realized. Uh, the biggest problem he has to solve is un, sort of, um, unfucking other plumbing contractors.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  Uh, ways they screwed, uh, or, or messed with other people's sort of stuff, right? So what we realized was he, he had an amazing book in him about how to figure out if your plumbing contractor is legit. And it's like essentially a systematic process where it's like, here's the questions to ask. If he says these things, he's legit. If he says these things, he's not. And it's really simple. You, it's, he doesn't teach you about plumbing. He comes at it from the perspective of like the homeowner installing a plumbing system, right? And it's like, who cares about that? Well, I'll tell you what, when you're installing a plumbing system and you search on Google, you have a very, very high. Uh, care, you're not, you're not browsing for this book, but when you need it, you need it, right? And he's like this big time plumbing contractor in a big area of the country.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  And so it's helped to get him a bunch of business and he's like the guy now for like plumbing. He's like one of the nationwide experts, uh, and like it's sort of same as Melissa's story. It's almost the same story. And we, he had a ton of really valuable knowledge, but it's only valuable at a specific time to a specific set of people. But it is extremely valuable to those people. We actually charge like the maximum for the ebook, nine ninety-nine that you can on Amazon for, for, uh, uh, that type of book. Because like, if you're gonna buy it, you don't care what it costs.

• 2:00:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  As long as. It's a legit book.

• 2:00:48Rich Roll?

  If your toilet's overflowing.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Exactly, and I think we're actually gonna end up doing a video, or we're not gonna do it, we're gonna push it to some people who do this. A video series with him, where he's gonna walk people through, here's how you like, okay plumbing contractor does this, he's right, whatever, so like even a sort of the higher end thing that'll be like nine nine dollars or whatever. Where like if you really wanna know what you're talking about even more than the book, then it goes even more into in depth. Because that that knowledge is, you're spending, I don't know, five grand on a plumbing sort of solution for your house or whatever it is, you need to know that stuff, you know? And so that's the sort of thing, it's called tacit knowledge. It's not literature, it's not life changing and sort of like, wow, I had this revelation.

• 2:01:29Rich Roll?

  It's not an owner's manual either, it's somewhere in between, so it's very, it's very, it runs very deep and very narrow.

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  Right, it's it's like a fifty thousand word book, so it's not that long, it's easy to read, you can skip around, he's like, some is commercials, some is, I don't know, bidets, there's like different systems, I don't, what do I know about plumbing, right? But it's like, I can totally see if I build a house, I'm gonna read that book, you know, I'm gonna read the section that matters to me, and that that's gonna be extremely valuable to me, that information.

• 2:01:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and and kind of expanding on the idea of what a book is, right, and I just read the piece you wrote that you put up, I think you just just put it up.

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  Conferences, yeah.

• 2:02:04Rich Roll?

  Conferences, and the idea of trying to, you know, capture, capture that information and repurpose it in new and different ways. And the idea that, you know, somebody would hold a conference and have all these amazing speakers, it seems almost painfully obvious that you would want to put all of that in writing and then offer it to people.

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  Yes, I I mean, like, it's like, you think about it, and so much about what we do in life is, I'm telling you, man, your son and my son are gonna have a conversation in thirty years, but can you believe our fucking dads used to drive their own cars? That's insane, like, no one's gonna believe that we used to allow people to routinely kill each other through operating motor vehicles. Of course, we didn't have the technology to sort of make them automated, but like, that's gonna be like one of those things people think is insane, I'm telling you, in five or ten years, people are gonna think it's insane that we had all this information and no one systematically turned it into.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  shared knowledge because I like dude think about the price of acquisition of just the plumbing example like what is it going to cost for me to learn all this stuff I gotta hire somebody at thousands of dollars or hundreds of dollars an hour and that's the cheapest solution and like I gotta hire a plumbing consultant to deal with my plumbing contractor and it's like all this sort of stuff it's it's not anything that's high and mighty and fancy but it is really important to people a lot of people a lot of times

• 2:03:26Rich Roll?

  but how I mean couldn't you just go Google it and try to find the answer I guess the the trick there is that you don't know that the information is reliable

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  you don't know it's reliable and also most of the stuff you actually can't Google you'd be shocked dude you think everything's on the internet we've just started I think we've literally just started Google is really good at cataloging information but like this sort of weird tacit information doesn't get put up because it's either too niche

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  or it's too expensive the opportunity cost for that plumber he makes I don't know 200 bucks an hour right or whatever as a plumbing contractor that's a lot of money he's not gonna sit down and write a book he's not gonna write a blog post about this it's nonsense but for he's gonna pay us because he knows he can indirectly ROI that book right because the knowledge actually is really valuable right and it's not like he's he's not writing a book about oh the six things your your SaaS business can learn from plumbers you know it's not like that stuff it's like here's how to do something that uh five million people have to do every year and 5000 people know how to do

• 2:04:29Rich Roll?

  yeah interesting

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  you know I mean like we talked about this earlier sometimes the most important stuff is the stuff operating in the background that makes things better Cisco is not a sexy company but it's worth 300 billion or whatever because it makes the world a way better place we're not gonna be a 300 billion dollar company or 30 billion dollar company probably not even a 3 billion dollar company but we can be a very valuable company because the process we're creating I think is going to unlock huge value chains uh for a lot of people I think in a way and not just the process we're creating I think if we're successful at this and all signs point to like a serious yes then people are gonna start realizing what if we could do this for music or movie scripts or whatever you know what if we remove the friction

• 2:05:15Speaker 01

  uh between turning an idea or a piece of knowledge into something that's consumable and authoritative and correct you know

• 2:05:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I can see how you can scale it and expand it into, you know, knowledge-based areas, even like, you know, keynote presentations and things like that, where people just don't have the time.

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  Speeches.

• 2:05:33Rich Roll?

  To do it, speeches, things like that. It gets tricky when you start to venture into the world of art, though. Like, when you're talking about screenplays and you're talking about, you know, sort of...

• 2:05:41Speaker 01

  You think so.

• 2:05:42Rich Roll?

  More...

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Except you do realize that, like, and I don't say this in a bad way, like, music, you ever think, "Oh, music, free-flowing, music's extremely formulaic." I mean, like, four-beat, you know, like, ask any musician, they'll tell you there's a ton of room for improvisation within the rule structure. Like, you... Free-form music is not music. It's a kid banging on a pot. That's not, I mean, that's... All music has very precise structure, just like you think, "Oh, you could never do this. It's fiction."

• 2:06:13Rich Roll?

  Well, and screenplay has structure and...

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  Screenplay is extremely structured.

• 2:06:16Rich Roll?

  Narrative fiction has structure. Everything has structure, you know, but, but, you know, the interplay between, you know, structure and expression.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. No, listen, you're absolutely right in that, like, I don't believe, I'm not saying, like, computers are gonna be writing good novels anytime soon. I mean, though, i-if you give people the structure, then, if people aren't thinking about process and they're just thinking about art, it makes the art better. It makes it, and it expands the type of art you can create. Think, the iPhone is a perfect example. So, 20 years ago, you're old enough to remember, 20 years ago, if you wanted to be a professional photographer, what did you need? Enough equipment to fill this room, right? Years of training on that equipment. You had to develop pictures, lenses, lighting, like, all these crazy things you had to learn that had nothing to do with actual, like, capturing an image, right? I mean, they do because it's the equipment you have to use, right?

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  What do you need now to be a professional photographer? An iPhone and Instagram. Like it, now, you still have to take great pictures.

• 2:07:16Rich Roll?

  A purist would take issue with that.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  Well, I mean.

• 2:07:20Rich Roll?

  And there's a difference between, you know, a night, like a Canon, you know, 5D and an iPhone.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, I'll tell you, every professional photographer I know says that that's, that, that sentence will be untrue before you know it.

• 2:07:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're heading in that direction.

• 2:07:36Speaker 01

  Right, and, and the difference now.

• 2:07:38Rich Roll?

  Accelerating.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  The difference now is so subtle that like, there's only a few cases where you need a serious Canon 5D and lenses and lighting and all that stuff. I mean, listen, you're never gonna hire someone with an iPhone to shoot your wedding, probably.

• 2:07:51Rich Roll?

  No, I mean, it's for whom and when. It's like, what is your purpose and what is your goal?

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  The point isn't that one's better than the other. The point is that, that an iPhone unlocks entirely new value chains of photography that did not exist. The good, the, the best photographers in the world right now are arguably Russian kids with iPhones hanging from antennas in Moscow, right? I mean, like, that's nuts and totally impossible before, totally impossible. Now it's possible, right? And so like, if it's possible with photography, what if someone does with content what the iPhone did to photography? It doesn't make old school cameras bad. It gives us so much more value to play with, you know?

• 2:08:28Rich Roll?

  Well, it democratizes everything.

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08:30Rich Roll?

  And so, in a certain respect, that, that's kind of your market advantage. You're democratizing something that is, you know, traditionally been reserved to the, you know.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  The elites.

• 2:08:42Rich Roll?

  Oak-paneled walls of, you know, of New York City and.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  It is the ultimate populist movement. Cause it's not, it's not saying giving, the internet gave everyone a voice. People have voices. Most people don't have shit to say. Fine. But the people who have something to say, but don't have the time or ability to turn it into a cogent, sort of structured piece of content, then we remove the friction. That's it. You know? And so that there, what they have to say can now be turned into a knowledge that's shared with the world, instead of just knowledge that's shared with people they know. You know? And just think of it on a personal level. How cool would it be if you had your great-grandfather who immigrated from Slovakia, whatever? Making it up, right? But like if you had his memoir about where he came from and what it was like,

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  you never met the guy, but it's like that's direct descendant. That's who you are in a lot of ways. How cool would that be? You know, like

• 2:09:37Rich Roll?

  It's almost like a cool gift you could give to somebody.

• 2:09:39Speaker 01

  My great grandmother was

• 2:09:40Rich Roll?

  Gift, you're gonna go and you're gonna talk to this guy and we're gonna put a book together.

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  My great grandmother and grandfather on my dad's side were Oscar Nazi Jews refugees from

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  some horrible, not, not the Nazis, it was earlier, but like some World War One thing, like not a sexy like genocide. It was like one of the normal awful ones, right? And like came to America, changed her name, Anglicized. You know how we figured out that we were Jewish, part Jewish? I took 23andMe tests. They never told anyone. It's not even part of our family history to realize that we are essentially exiled Oscar, Oscar Nazi Jews on my dad's sort of paternal line. My dad didn't know he was 40% Jew.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  And that's just one tiny little thing.

• 2:10:24Rich Roll?

  Right, just lost forever.

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  Doesn't have to be.

• 2:10:28Rich Roll?

  So what's the vision?

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  That's it. That's the vision is that we turn the knowledge and wisdom of the smartest, most capable people into books. We, we share the knowledge and wisdom of the smartest people in the world with the world. That's it. Like that's what we're trying to do.

• 2:10:46Rich Roll?

  And is this like your full time? Is this pretty much a full time thing for you now?

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's

• 2:10:51Rich Roll?

  How many employees do you guys have?

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  We just hired employee number five, number six and seven start next week.

• 2:10:57Rich Roll?

  And then how many like stringers do you have?

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Freelancers, we've got maybe 40 or 50 that we work with on a routine basis. Yeah, and we, we don't, no offices, totally remote company. Dude, like I have a whole sort of, we started this company, I, I was, I swore no industrial era, corporate age principles. We're going to, this is a total knowledge economy. Everything of value in this company is in the heads and the hearts of the people who run it. So we're gonna build it totally differently from the ground up and the assumption that

• 2:11:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's no like intellectual property, technology application.

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  To it, really, it's a human resources thing. Uh, no, no, there, there's no IP in terms you think of like, uh, like software. But our, our process is, is, I hesitate to call it proprietary, it is. We're, I mean, we're gonna put it in a book and give it away and teach anyone how to do it. But like, um, it, it, it, it is, it's a lot of things that individually, a lot of other people have done. We put it together in a way no one else has. Yeah. Uh, because we're getting results no one else has gotten. And we're doing things that no one else has done. And, uh, I think this is only the beginning, though. I think if we can turn this into software as a service, then we try, we, we have to charge fifteen thousand dollars now. It's an expensive thing, right? But if it's software as a service, we can charge fifty dollars.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  And then we can have a whole marketplace where it's like, oh, you wanna pay five hundred bucks for an amazing cover? No problem, we've got the, everyone there. The service can meet the budget. Exactly. Then it can expand, you can do it yourself, or you can, if your budget's three grand, you can get amazing work for three grand, et cetera, et cetera, right? And then, all of a sudden, it, this isn't just reserved for people who have money and no time. Now it's anyone who has anything to say, any knowledge and wisdom they wanna pass on. Anyone who wants to record stuff for posterity for their family, anyone. And of course, ninety-nine percent, ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of that will be, uh, I don't wanna call it worthless, but extremely niche use cases.

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  But they're a whole genre of books, a whole series of books are going to come into existence that are world-changing, that would not otherwise have existed. Like Joan of Arc's memoir, not literally, but like, that's something like that, um, is gonna happen. Because, and it's not, it, it doesn't trade off with, I don't think we're disruptive to traditional publishing. That's the funny thing, is like, you're never gonna use our service, nor should you, anyone who's a writer. And, and what you're doing is not a threat to what they're doing. It's not. It's, it's actually complimentary. Right, iPhones didn't get rid of Canon, uh, five Ds. It, it turned a whole new class of people into a, a type of photographer and unlocked a whole new value chain.

• 2:13:33Speaker 01

  I think we are, uh, actually not, weirdly not disruptive at all to traditional publishing, um, uh, even though you would think. These are books they would never touch anyway, so it doesn't matter. They wouldn't exist anyway. There might be a tiny sort of element of some people who might have gone to digital publishing who use this anyway. Celebrity memoirs, things like that.

• 2:13:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a Venn diagram and at some point, you know, you have the person who wants to, you know, who's making that decision to self-publish as opposed to go the traditional route for, for reasons I'm sure you can understand and reasons I've contemplated. And there's a big difference between self-publishing and professionally self-publishing, right? And to the extent that you can help somebody navigate that Byzantine world, you know, that's a, that's a value because otherwise, you know, I tried to study it. I learned as much as I could about the differences between traditional.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  You gotta pay, just pay somebody.

• 2:14:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it's like, it's a lot.

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what, if you want to self-publish, obviously, we actually don't advertise this just because it's not like, a core part of our business. We have maybe 10% of our business are people like you who establish writers. They want to self-publish, but they want professional self-publishing and they don't want to learn it themselves. It's like six grand to take a finished manuscript all the way through the end of the process. That's no problem.

• 2:14:45Rich Roll?

  Right, that's like what.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  But that doesn't change the world. That's just additive.

• 2:14:49Rich Roll?

  Like what James, like what James.

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  Exactly what I did with James. And then I did the publishing, Ryan did the marketing, the book did amazing. That, that, that's interesting, but that doesn't change the world. That's just additive. It's a small efficiency change to what exists. I think the book in a box process is a totally different thing. That's what's exciting to me. I mean, the other thing is great, we'll do it. Like if you want to self-publish, dude, we'll, we'll give you a friend rate. We'll do amazing. No one will be able to tell the difference between those books and the ones we do with you. It's no problem. And, and it'll be far cheaper than if you ever decided to do it yourself. And there's reasons to do that, not do that. And if you want to explore that, I'll be happy to get on the phone, walk you through it. Although I'm sure you're smart enough and Bird has probably told you everything.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  But like, that's, that's just like, okay, fine. That's just a service that, that's fine. It's like hiring someone to fix your plumber or plumbing.

• 2:15:38Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  No problem. But we're, we're creating a whole new sort of thing, you know?

• 2:15:43Rich Roll?

  That's exciting.

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm. We'll see. That's what we're trying to do, man. You know, a lot of people try to do this. Not everything works. We'll see.

• 2:15:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's a laudable goal and it's already profitable and it's already succeeding and growing. So, you know, and you're obviously passionate about it, too.

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  We, because I've seen what we can do already.

• 2:16:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  You know, and I know it's just the beginning. I see some of the stuff coming through. Like, dude, Khalil's a perfect example, dude. That book doesn't exist. And his book might be amazing and change the world. It might change five people's lives. If you know it just says that, that's pretty cool. But we're gonna do one of these, uh, that's gonna really, truly be like the, what the autobiography of Malcolm X was to a certain type of person, a certain generation. We're gonna do that book for the next generation. And we can't take, I'm not gonna take credit for it.

• 2:16:29Rich Roll?

  The way it's gonna happen, yeah, the way it's gonna happen is it's gonna be some unknown person that nobody's ever heard of. And there's gonna be something about that story that's just gonna connect in a, in a way that you can't fathom or predict. Totally. In a way that, you know, something like Fifty Shades of Grey becomes a thing. Like, you don't know how that happens. It just happens, right? And, and inevitably with-

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  That no one else was doing.

• 2:16:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, with volume, you know, that day will come. Right?

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, that's why we don't try to predict.

• 2:16:55Rich Roll?

  And you're gonna wish that you actually had a percentage on that.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I know.

• 2:16:59Rich Roll?

  I mean, what was that, you obviously, probably, I'm sure you thought about that and you made a very conscious decision to not, you know, be a participant.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Well, because here's, here's the thing. I feel like if we start, uh, trying to capture the upside, then it screws up our incentives. You know, and it makes us, you, it's, if you try and feed on, uh, both sides, it doesn't work. Um, we are either a service business or we are a partner business, right? You can't be both. A market-

• 2:17:27Rich Roll?

  Well, traditional publishing is, isn't it?

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  Right. And that's why they do a terrible job.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  Because they're, no, their incentives are to just sign as many books as they can afford, throw shit against the wall, see what works.

• 2:17:38Rich Roll?

  They have an incentive for it to be good because they're participating in the upside.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  No, not, not once they buy it. Because once they buy it-

• 2:17:44Rich Roll?

  Aren't you less incentivized for it to be good if you're not participating in it?

• 2:17:47Speaker 01

  No, no, because-

• 2:17:49Rich Roll?

  You're just getting paid. It doesn't matter to you whether it's any good or not.

• 2:17:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. Because, uh, uh, our business card is the quality of every book we put out. The way we get clients is because they see the quality of the publishing.

• 2:18:02Rich Roll?

  But fundamentally, you're a volume business. You would be, yeah, because you're only gonna make money the number of books that come in.

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  I don't think we are. No, seriously, actually fundamentally, I think we're a customer service business. The way we've structured our business is fundamentally as a customer service business. And like, we want the author to come out the other side utterly delighted with interacting with us. Super proud of the book and excited about that, but like, also like, man, it was so enjoyable to deal with them. Because if we do that, then we're gonna get, uh, I mean, every, then we become Zappos, you know? And like, if you can be a company where people love working with you, then um, you, it's all upside. Like, that's a, that's a moat that other people can't cross, you know? Especially because, you're right, we don't have proprietary, patentable software yet, at least, right?

• 2:18:53Speaker 01

  So like, we need to build a moat, and customer service builds brands in a way nothing else does. Whereas publishers, believe it or not, are not incentivized to make your book good. Here's why. It's already a sunk cost. They've already spent the money in advance. Every dollar they spend after this is actually a much riskier dollar. Because they don't know what's gonna work, which is why what you always see is, uh, they spend, they overspend on the advance, buyer's remorse, they spend nothing, if the book does well, then they try and throw money after it to make it work, which doesn't work either, right? Their whole system is screwed up. Uh, the structure doesn't work, man. In a world where there's zero transaction cost information, it's actually the person creating the content who is the most valuable, right?

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  That's, that's 21st century information-based economy. 20th century resource-based, uh, industrial economy is totally different. Um, because there's only a certain number of books that can be produced, so the, the scarcity is getting your book produced. Creates entirely different business structure. That's why I said, like, we're trying to build a business structure that is for the 21st century, not 20th century.

• 2:19:59Rich Roll?

  Right, so the key for you is systems for customer service and hiring the right people.

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:05Rich Roll?

  And you're gonna live and die.

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  If we produce amazing books regardless of the ideas in them, then we are gonna have an amazing business. That's our, that's our goal. Garbage in, garbage out, amazing book, amazing book. Amazing idea, amazing book. Like, that's it.

• 2:20:19Rich Roll?

  Well, good luck to you, man.

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  Thank you, brother.

• 2:20:22Rich Roll?

  I think we did it.

• 2:20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, uh, that was maybe the longest podcast I've ever been on.

• 2:20:26Rich Roll?

  How long did we go for?

• 2:20:28Speaker 01

  Uh, like-

• 2:20:28Rich Roll?

  Oh dude, we're over two hours.

• 2:20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was quite a while.

• 2:20:30Rich Roll?

  It's pretty good. I've gone three before.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  No, that was fantastic, though. That was great.

• 2:20:34Rich Roll?

  Thanks for doing it, man. I appreciate it.

• 2:20:36Speaker 01

  No, of course. Thank you for being patient.

• 2:20:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so, um, what's that?

• 2:20:40Speaker 01

  I gotta tell Zach where to pick me up.

• 2:20:42Rich Roll?

  Uh, if you're digging on Tucker, the best way to, um, connect with you, what is that these days? TuckerMax at me, bookinabox.com?

• 2:20:51Speaker 01

  So, uh, the best way to connect is, well, if you're interested in Book in a Box, just go to bookinabox.com and then we have like a, like a little form. If you want to email me or something, it's just tuckermax@gmail. It's fine. Like, I have a real-

• 2:21:03Rich Roll?

  Dude, we could have a whole podcast about how you deal with email.

• 2:21:07Speaker 01

  Uh, it's not so bad anymore.

• 2:21:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  Uh, but me, I have a, uh, my secret is I just ignore it, uh, unless it desperately needs a response. I don't have a, I'm not a-

• 2:21:16Rich Roll?

  You have some, like, hack secret?

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  No, dude. Um, I'm not, I'm not, I wish I had some, like, fancy productivity technique. Uh, it's not. I just, I'm not, I, I wish I could be one of those productivity guys because I feel like I'd get a lot more done. It's just not the way my brain works. Like, I try systems and processes and for me, it always boils down to like what you have, writing shit down and keeping it in front of me and focusing on what matters.

• 2:21:41Rich Roll?

  It's hard to, it's hard to take the, there's lots of ideas around there, but actually implementing those is tricky. It rarely works with me. I still end up just writing everything in a Moleskine and just taking notes on my iPhone and doing the best I can with email and like not beating myself up if I can't answer every one of them.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:21:59Rich Roll?

  And that's all you can do, right?

• 2:22:01Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 2:22:01Rich Roll?

  Alright, so bookinabox.com, at TuckerMax on Twitter, tuckermax.me is your-

• 2:22:06Speaker 01

  TuckerMax.me is sort of like the new site that has newer stuff?

• 2:22:08Rich Roll?

  Dude, you're easy to find.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Uh, Google. Google works for me.

• 2:22:12Rich Roll?

  Alright, thanks for doing it.

• 2:22:14Speaker 01

  Thank you, man.

• 2:22:14Rich Roll?

  Alright, peace.

• 2:22:16Speaker 01

  Lance.

• 2:22:33Rich Roll?

  All right, so that happened. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Let me know what you thought of the episode in the comments section on the episode page at richroll.com. Keep sending your questions in for future Q&A podcasts to [email protected]. We're going to be recording one of these in the next couple of days, so fire them off, you guys. Let's hear from you. For all your Plant Power needs, visit richroll.com. We've got nutrition products, books, education products, 100% organic cotton garments. We've got running tech tees. We've got a meditation program. Basically, all kinds of stuff to help you take your health and your life to the next level, including our new cookbook, The Plant Power Way, and my memoir, Finding Ultra. You guys know about all this stuff. And if you're into online courses, I've got two of those at mindbodygreen.com.

• 2:23:18Rich Roll?

  The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, three and a half hours of streaming video, and The Art of Living with Purpose, which is all about goal-setting and doing the internal work. A lot of the stuff that we talked about on the show today to help create the right trajectory for yourself and set guideposts and really tools and resources to help drive you forward with the best momentum on the best path possible for you. Thanks for supporting the show. Thanks for telling a friend. Thank you for sharing on social media. I love you guys for doing that. And of course, thank you for using the Amazon banner at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. I'll see you guys in a few. Have a great week, everybody. I appreciate you sticking with me all the way to the end and look forward to another

• 2:24:03Rich Roll?

  great episode next week. I'm out. Peace. Blance.