Starting and running businesses is hard — not conceptually hard, but personally hard.

No one really prepares you for how much resilience it takes. It’s less about having the perfect plan and more about showing up every day when things feel uncertain.

Books have the power to shape, influence, and change our lives. Why is that so? What goes into a book that can shape lives? To address this we are interviewing people who can share a story about a book that changed their life, and why. As a part of our series, I had the pleasure of interviewing David Tuch.

David Tuch, PhD, is a technology entrepreneur and author. His writing uncovers overlooked stories at the intersection of organized crime and espionage. Originally from New York, he has lived in England and France and now makes his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and four children. The Wireless Operator is his first book.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory” and where you grew up?

I grew up in New York. My mother was a literacy instructor, and my father was a taxi driver before becoming an English teacher. My sister’s a fiction writer, teacher, and editor.

Books were a big part of our upbringing, and we were encouraged to think about big ideas from an early age. I studied philosophy in college before switching to physics and then earned a graduate degree in engineering. I went on to have a rewarding career as an entrepreneur and sold my business a few years ago.

While figuring out what to do next, I stumbled across the remarkable story of my British cousin, who was a criminal mastermind. That discovery brought me back to my first love — writing — and became the basis for my new book, The Wireless Operator.

Let’s talk about your forthcoming book, The Wireless Operator. How do you conceive of the story behind this book?

I was doing some genealogy research and exchanging emails with a distant cousin. He casually mentioned that we had a mutual cousin named Harold Derber, who was a major gun-runner and drug trafficker. When I asked another relative, she said just as matter-of-factly that Derber used to run guns for Castro. I was hooked. From there, I started reading through old newspapers and government documents and uncovered a story far stranger than any espionage novel I’d ever read. I dug further. Through archival research, FOIA requests, the unpublished memoir of his lover, and interviews with both his former accomplices and the agents who chased him, I was able to piece together his absolutely unbelievable story.

Which three character traits do you think have been most instrumental to your work?

My technical training makes me approach every claim by looking for multiple lines of evidence — whether that’s government files, archives, or interviews — and seeing where they converge and diverge. That’s particularly important when writing about espionage and organized crime when the subjects have a strong motivation to deceive and obfuscate.

My entrepreneurial background taught me to treat writing as an iterative process. I share early drafts with readers and editors and use their feedback much like product testing, refining as I go. And third, I have the persistence to spend day after day in paper archives chasing down buried details. I love the detective work of research and the joy of discovery.

What’s the inspiration behind your work?

My father was terminally ill when I began writing the book. Returning to writing at that time was a way for us to reconnect. He had always encouraged my interest in books and ideas, and being able to share drafts with him and talk through the story gave us something meaningful to hold onto in those final months. That experience stayed with me.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My sister is an exceptional fiction writer and editor, and I’m deeply grateful to her. She encouraged me to keep going with the book when I had doubts. Just as importantly, she pushed me to portray the human element in Derber’s story — especially his romance with Sari Cohen, who had shadowy dealings of her own. My sister’s reminders helped me make sure the book wasn’t just about Derber’s crimes, but also about the complicated man behind them.

Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. I’m an author and I believe that books have the power to change lives. Can you please tell our readers about “The Book That Changed Your Life”?

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had an enormous impact on me. The protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, wrestles with faith, family expectations, and the weight of his upbringing while trying to claim his own path as an artist. That tension — breaking free yet respecting tradition — resonated deeply with me, and still shapes my thinking today.

Can you describe a moment or share a story about how “the book that changed your life” inspired you to make big changes in your life?

Joyce’s portrayal of Dedalus showed me how powerful literature can be in capturing the tension between where we come from and who we want to become. That lens helped me better understand my cousin Harold Derber — his choices, his struggles with his Jewish identity, and the contradictions in his life — which gave me the confidence to write his story in a more human and complex way.

Can you articulate why you think books have the power to create movements, trends, and change?

I’d actually answer with a counter-example. Many of the challenges young men face today, I think, come from the disappearance of novels that truly speak to them. There are few modern equivalents to the adventure writers of the past — people like Stevenson or Conrad — or to writers who wrote unflinchingly about men’s experience, like McCarthy and Hemingway. At the same time, male readership has been in steady decline. Whether that’s due to demand, supply, or the distribution channels, the challenge is real. Thrillers sometimes fill the gap, but they often lack the conceptual depth. My hope is that, in some small way, my own writing can offer stories that young men recognize as speaking directly to them.

A book has many aspects, of course. For example, you have the writing style, the narrative tense, the topic, the genre, the design, the cover, etc. In your opinion, what are the main, essential ingredients needed to create a book that have the power to impact lives?

It’s important to make the people feel real. Too often, characters’ motivations come across as contrived. What moves me most is seeing real people faced with hard decisions and then living through the consequences. In historical nonfiction especially, there’s a tendency to present people as if their paths were inevitable, when in reality they were often uncertain, conflicted, and improvising. Showing that humanity — their doubts, risks, and choices — is what gives a book its impact.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Career” and why?

1. Starting and running businesses is hard — not conceptually hard, but personally hard.

No one really prepares you for how much resilience it takes. It’s less about having the perfect plan and more about showing up every day when things feel uncertain.

2. It’s okay to improvise.

Early on, I thought I needed everything figured out in advance. In reality, some of the best breakthroughs came from adapting on the fly when plans go sideways.

3. People work with people.

Ideas and execution matter, but in the end relationships are what carry projects forward. The teams I’ve been part of succeeded or failed largely on trust and communication.

4. Divisions between disciplines are fluid.

I started in philosophy, shifted to physics, then engineering, and later entrepreneurship. That mix gave me tools I didn’t expect — it taught me that the boundaries we think are fixed often aren’t.

5. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

There’s a big temptation to push for quick wins. But the real progress — whether in business or writing — comes from sustained effort over decades, not weeks.

The world, of course, needs progress in many areas. What movement do you hope someone (or you!) starts next? Can you explain why that is so important?

As I touched on above, I hope we begin to address the lack of books written for young men and the steady decline in male readership. For centuries, stories have given young men models of courage, integrity, and adventure, whether through Kipling’s tales or Hemingway’s war novels. Today, many of those voices have disappeared, and with them the myths that help young men make sense of their own lives. When half the population is cut off from engaging with serious fiction and narrative nonfiction, we lose a powerful tool for empathy and imagination.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Visit my website davidtuch.com, follow on Instagram, and subscribe to my newsletter. I always enjoy hearing from readers, so don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and our readers. We know that it will make a tremendous difference and impact thousands of lives. We are excited to connect further and we wish you so much joy in your next success.

Author David Tuch On The Book That Changed His Life was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.