Tucker Max—once a disgraced law student turned I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell author—now lives off-grid in Texas, raising grass-fed livestock and rejecting industrial food after selling his ghostwriting empire. His psychedelic-induced spiritual awakening four years ago shattered his atheism, aligning him with Christ’s and Buddha’s teachings on interconnectedness, which he contrasts with modern governance’s dependency-inducing systems. From drunken excess to regenerative homesteading, Max’s arc reflects a radical pivot: from chasing status to embracing self-sufficiency, warning that empire collapse demands resilience beyond consumerist illusions. [Automatically generated summary]
About 20 years ago, a recent law school graduate called Tucker Max started posting his experiences, the details of his dating life, on the internet.
He became a sensation.
He wrote a bunch of best-selling books, sold millions of copies, the most famous of which was called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.
Not everyone likes Tucker Max.
A lot of people hated Tucker Max, but nobody could deny that he was smart.
He was a beautiful prose stylist, not something you normally find in people writing about hooking up with ladies and getting loaded.
But he was.
And then he retired around 2012.
He stopped writing about that stuff and receded from public view.
And then a few years ago, he reemerged as a very different person, as someone whose entire life was devoted to his own family at a level most people can't relate to.
He became a homesteader.
What an interesting progression.
We thought it'd be worth spending some time hearing how that happened and what it's like to truly prepare for the bad times on behalf of your family.
There's a way to play this game and you're doing it totally wrong.
And I was.
And so, even that wouldn't have blacklisted me from the legal profession.
But I wrote two days before she propositioned me, or before they fired me, I had gotten drunk at a firm event and caused kind of a scene, although it was kind of funny, and so I wrote an email about it that was pretty funny, and I sent it to my friends.
We had a charity auction, and I got up and I took the mic from the auctioneer, and I was yelling at this girl because she was bidding against me, and the price was high.
I'm like, stop bidding.
I can't afford this, and I need this to stay at the firm.
It was kind of like a funny...
It was like the funny drunken person at a corporate event.
I really didn't go too far, but I went right up to that line.
I love to make myself out to be a hero, but the true story is I didn't have the courage to realize that it was a horrible, soulless path that I didn't want to go to, so I acted out until they fired me and kicked me out of the profession.
But the only reason she let me back was because I promised not to walk at graduation.
Like, I was going to graduate.
And so, it was like, Like, basically, if I wasn't there, which I didn't care about going to anyway, because I knew I wasn't going to get a job in a legal profession, I just wanted to finish for two reasons.
One is because I didn't want to quit and not have my degree, right?
Which probably, honestly, would have been the best thing for me, but I was one of those where I was like, no, I want to actually have the...
I don't want to say I went to Duke Law School, I want to have the JD, which I do.
But then also, I had such...
It was like my party years.
Like everyone else's party years are an undergrad.
Yeah, it was not a good situation for me because where I was was I had enough courage to get drunk and ruin a future I didn't want, but not enough courage to recognize that that's what I was doing.
So I was in like this tough situation.
My dad owned some restaurants in Florida.
And so I was still kind of looking for the easy path, right?
Like law and iBanking and management consulting, even though you're working 100-something hour weeks, they really are the easy path.
They are the soulless, easy, coward path.
Yes.
And so the next coward path for me was the family business.
And I never really wanted to go into restaurants or the family business.
But now I'm like, well, this is, you know, the two things I've trained for, I wasn't good at.
So I'm not allowed to anymore.
So I kind of went that path.
And then I got fired from the family business in like six months.
Now, I was good because it's restaurant business, right?
And I'm smart and outgoing.
And if you're smart and outgoing, the restaurant business is designed for people who don't fit anywhere else but are kind of smart and capable.
And so I was good at it.
The problem was I assumed that my dad wanted to run a good business.
I didn't realize the business existed for my dad's ego.
And so I got in and realized, oh, there's all kinds of people here who suck, who are stealing from him.
There's all these things we could be doing better.
I mean, really basic stuff.
Like, why are we ordering from this company?
They're charging twice as much as this company.
It turns out that company's giving my dad kickbacks.
And then these people who are incompetent stealing from him, you know, feed my dad's ego in a way that he values way more than what they're stealing.
But like a fool, just like I didn't sleep with a partner and told everyone, I went in, recognized these people were clowns, and was like, oh, well, this is my dad and my name's on the door, so clearly the fact that I'm right is more than enough.
I told them that they sucked and that I was going to get them fired.
And they were smart enough and knew my dad well enough.
They rallied kind of the troops and got enough evidence against me that my dad picked them over me.
The kind of jobs that losers in their 20s get, that was me.
I was a loser in my 20s.
Early 20s.
And then at the same time, I was writing emails to some of my friends from law school about all, you know, living in South Florida, which is a soulless, horrible place, because I don't do drugs, and I'm not old.
So there was no social niche for me in South Florida, right?
Because if you do coke and you go to clubs, South Florida's great.
And if you're like 70 and, you know, play golf in the Boca Country Club, then it's great.
But there's nothing else.
And so I hated my life.
But, you know, I get drunk and hook up with girls anyway.
And get in these horrible situations and write emails about it and send them to my friends.
One, I kind of gave away for free, but three were published.
All three were New York Times bestsellers.
I think I've sold about four and a half-ish million of those books.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
Especially because my audience were essentially people who don't read.
I can't tell you how many dudes in my life, it's been tens of thousands, have told me I've never finished a book, read a book, or bought a book other than yours.
And I wasn't going to sing Satisfaction the rest of my life.
Eventually, as I matured a little, I'm like, look, what am I doing getting mad at them?
Like, they...
Even the dumb, immature ones.
Like, the smart, mature ones got it.
They read the books out there.
They were funny.
Didn't expect me to be.
But that was 20%, right?
Most people, like, they would come up and, you know, they have this multi-year relationship with me that has nothing to do with me, right?
It's totally unilateral and it's all about a projection in their mind of who I am based only on the books.
And that was, um, it got really tiring after a while.
And then instead of trying to fight it and getting mad at them, I'm like, all right, well.
I just need to move on with my life.
And so I wrote, uh, the last in the series was assholes finish first.
And I put it like a retirement at the end where I'm like, I'm not going to write this stuff, talk about it anymore.
Um, like I've, I've done with this part of my life.
And then that kind of did set me free.
Although most people who know me, know me from that stuff.
And so even that bro, for years afterwards, like I would be at Whole Foods and a kid with like a younger kid or something would come up to me and be like, Oh, it's your Tucker Max.
I'm like, why aren't you drunk, screaming curses at people laying under a table?
And I'm like, it's 11 a.m.
on a Thursday!
Like, what is wrong with you, dude?
But even now, to this day, a lot of people, their impression of me, even after they meet me, is still...
I wrote about it, and then women who were at that stage, you know, the same stage as me, came to me.
And so there were a lot.
And I realized, man, there's so much.
The big thing, man, was I realized I needed a woman who was very smart, who was very sweet and empathic, but most importantly, I need a woman who really had her own thing in life, who really thought for herself.
Who really was her own person, right?
Because three or four years before I started, I retired, I would have been really happy with the hottest girl there was who was pretty sweet and basically a trophy wife, right?
I would have been totally cool with that.
And then by the time I got to be about 32, 33, 34, I realized, oh, thank God I didn't get married.
I would have been so miserable with that.
I would have hated that.
I would have been divorced within five, six years.
I realized I needed a partner.
And then I started to understand what a partner actually would look like for me at that point.
That's the crazy thing, man.
I think I had to go through, whatever, hundreds or thousands of women to realize how lonely I was and how lonely that life is after a while.
The metaphor I always use is, imagine that like...
Because dudes don't get this, man.
They don't understand.
Women do.
Most women understand what I mean when I talk about this.
Because most guys have to go their whole life.
It doesn't matter how good-looking you are, how smart or how rich you are.
You have to work for women.
You have to have game.
You have to talk to them.
You have to be good in some way, at least connecting with a woman.
But once you get famous, all that's out the window.
Like, you don't...
I have to really do anything but other than be famous.
And there's a million examples of this, of dudes who have no business being with any women who are famous, who get all kinds of women.
And you can't understand what that's like as a dude because you've spent your whole life, like, imagine living on a desert island and you're scraping out an existence and you have food but never enough.
And then all of a sudden you get picked up off of that desert island and you get moved into a Chinese buffet.
Right, and you've got to really, okay, I don't want everything.
Here's what's healthy.
Here's what I want.
Let me figure out what that is.
So in a lot of ways, the best...
It's funny.
People will say, your intro is really good.
It seems like a 180-degree turnaround.
From where I sit, having lived it, I couldn't have gotten to be a dedicated father and husband and homesteader if I hadn't gone through that phase of unbridled abundance and hedonism.
As the business grew and developed, I saw a very clear path to a lot of money, big valuations, expansion, all this stuff.
But at the same time, my relationship with my wife and my kids, and as my kids got older, even though my kids are still pretty young, I was in a lot of social groups and masterminds with pretty advanced and successful entrepreneurs who had way bigger companies than me.
And who were older and had older kids.
And I saw kind of how miserable they were in a lot of ways.
And like how much time they spent on their business, how little they spent with their families.
And then I would like meet their kids and be like, hmm, something's off there.
Not all of them.
Some of them had great balance and some didn't.
And I just kind of realized, man, that as much as I did, I like business and I like entrepreneurship.
I didn't love it.
And I definitely didn't love it more than my wife or my kids.
And I realized like, what?
I don't know when I came to this realization, but I came to the realization that the only thing that matters in my life is the relationships with the people I love and the things I do that matter to them.
And yeah, I mean, like having a company to make money, that's important, but above a certain level, like what am I doing?
I'm just stealing from my children.
I'm stealing my father from their children.
Or I'm stealing my children's father from them, which is me.
I decided I wasn't going to do that.
$200 million or a billion dollars is not worth that.
And so I was, you can actually look at my Twitter timeline.
There's a, when South by was canceled in 2020, I was for that.
I was like, oh yeah, that was like March 15th of 2020. I was totally for that.
But then by mid-April, I'm like, hold on.
Like, nothing about this seems right.
And by May, I'm like, oh, well, this is a fraud.
Like, this is clearly a fraud.
And then the riots started, and it was like, I mean, the iconic photo of the, you know, the CNN with the Chiron, you know, mostly peaceful protest, and there's fire in the background.
January 6th of 2021. And in real time, you just watched the feeds, and I saw...
I mean, because it wasn't hidden.
The Capitol Police were letting people in, and most of these people were just drunken buffoons, and it was, like, obvious that this was nonsense, that this was...
In no way, shape, or form anything approaching an insurrection.
And then you would turn on cable news, and in real time you'd see them form this narrative that's not just wrong, but literally totally contrary to what's going on and I can see.
I don't know why that moment, but at that moment I realized that the Republic had fallen.
I don't think it fell at that moment.
It had fallen probably decades, maybe a century before.
But I did not truly internalize it until that moment.
JFK. I don't know when the American Republic fell, but it became very clear.
Deniably clear to me on January 6th, 2021, that we were not just an empire, but we were the late stages of empire.
Like, I'd essentially missed understanding the American empire was an empire.
And I was like, oh man.
And then once I got that, then I'm like, oh, now everything makes sense.
This is empire collapse.
And I understand empire collapse pretty well.
Like, I'm very, like all dudes, very interested in the Roman history and Mongolian history.
And if you study both the transition from republic to empire in Rome and the transition from Genghis Khan to his sons, because they were never republic, but under Genghis Khan, the Mongolian Empire was what we would consider a free place in a lot of ways for these Mongolians.
And the transition from that to his sons and grandsons...
Because, okay, when empire collapses, the thing that matters most is community.
Who are you around?
What skills do they have?
What skills do you have?
How well can your group band together and endure the tumultuous chaos until some new steady state arises?
And having a cabin in the woods...
The old school American thought of prepping is really based on nuclear war and hiding a bunker.
It's just nonsense.
It's not really thought out.
But if you go study end of empire and you study people who've lived through intense chaos, they all say the same thing.
When the Roman Empire, not the Republic, when the empire fell, there were lots of places that did great.
Because, you know, some warlord or the local Roman general would just say, okay, we're going to make this town my empire, and the legions are going to marry local girls, and this is our area, and those became, I mean, you can name them.
But the point is, my cabin in the woods had no community.
And so my wife and I, where can we go to find community?
How do we build a community?
And it starts by not a cabin in the woods, but by growing, raising your own food, taking responsibility for water, power, and food, but in the context of where a lot of other people are doing the same.
And so we knew we wanted to stay in Texas for a few reasons, and we ended up picking Dripping Springs.
Um, it's not the, there's a lot of like kind of towns in Texas that are doing things like this.
Uh, dripping is not the only one.
It's the one that we like the best for a couple of different reasons.
So we bought a homestead.
Uh, we actually, we bought a place, a beautiful ranch was not a homestead.
We've had to convert it to a homestead, but whatever.
And then we started to school and, uh, encouraged it.
Well, generally speaking, a ranch is where you just sort of raise livestock.
But what we bought was...
Because I didn't know, right?
I didn't really understand land.
I bought a place that this older guy, this boomer, had kind of carved out of nothing, and it was beautiful.
Beautiful oak trees and rolling pasture, but it was dead.
I mean, literally dead.
The soil was dead.
Everything was dead because the way he dealt with the land was very 20th century kind of mentality.
It was pesticides kill the bugs, herbicides kill the weeds.
Fertilizer raises the grass.
That doesn't really work well.
It can work sort of for a while in certain circumstances, but if you want to actually have a living, thriving ecosystem, I kind of went deep in the permaculture and regenerative agriculture worlds, and I realized that those people had figured it out.
What we had to do was stop all chemicals.
I had to fire all the people he had that were working there, the landscapers or whatever.
Everything was irrigated.
He had St. Augustine grass, which requires like 130 inches of rain a year.
He was irrigating, but nonetheless, it's like, what are we doing?
This doesn't make sense with our land and where we are.
And so the last two years, I've spent essentially...
Turning it into living soil and regenerating the land and doing management practices that make sense for Dripping Springs, Texas for 30 inches of rain a year.
And, you know, like, and now we have, like, it's not where it's going to be in three, four, five years, but it's good, man.
We've got a big flock of sheep, bees, we have meat chickens, egg chickens, you know, like, we have...
And I want to put this to the President of the United States with a message that I think is relevant to you, which is that those are not your kids, actually.
Here he is.
unidentified
Rebecca put a teacher's creed into words when she said, there's no such thing as someone else's child.
It's like when people say, you know, I'm coming to take your guns.
Like, well, stack up.
Stack up and come get them.
Same with kids.
No, those are my kids.
Those children are mine and my wife's.
now i i will say let's give it a very uh judicious um uh interpretation if what he means and i don't think this is what he means but if what he means is i don't own my children like they're chattel or slaves that they are independent beings and my job is to steward them totally agree totally on board yes in no way shape or Yes.
want totally on board i see my job is to help them become full people yes and find the lives they want i don't think that's what he means I think what he means is the very typical, bureaucratic, really, it's really a communist, Marxist idea that children are the property of the state.
So, I always thought, I mean, of course I vehemently agree with you, but the number of parents who presumably love their kids more than their own lives, most parents do, I think, who are willing to let not just Alzheimer's patients posing as president, but any representative of the state just kind of come in, do whatever they want to their kids, sexualize their kids, basically like kiddie porn shit with their kids, and they allow it.
And I'm not saying this, this isn't like a conspiracy theory or a metaphor.
There's a guy, John Taylor Gatto, who wrote a couple great books about this.
The literal stated goal.
Horace Mann, all those people who invented the American public educational system, their stated goal is to create...
Subservient employees who know how to be good citizens.
And I didn't have children for that reason, to serve some other man or woman or some faceless bureaucratic entity.
No.
And so if someone was raised by people who went to public school, who were just employees, and that's who they are.
It's hard.
I mean this, like, not judgmentally.
I can imagine it'd be really hard for that person to understand, well, this is where I went.
This was good enough for me.
They're supposed to be experts.
Why wouldn't they know better, you know?
I can understand how a lot of people would get to that spot.
Now, the good news is all this nonsense lunacy with trans and other crap in schools sexualizing little children is a lot of people starting to wake up and realize, What, I mean, I knew this, I had never had any plan to send my kids to public school.
Like, that was never, I went to public schools mostly, and I realized how nonsense they were when I was there.
My parents weren't very good, but they weirdly, they gave me a gift.
They weren't, they were not good parents.
They weren't bad people, they were just bad parents.
I would not be married to her if she wasn't, if we didn't share these values.
We were very aligned in a lot of stuff when we met, and she's done a lot of her own emotional therapeutic work as well, and we both have grown so much together over the last 10 years in parallel ways.
But I've seen people who split in the last three or four years because their values just went different.
The split was already there, but this kind of forced it.
Nothing I'm doing is probably going to make any difference, right?
95% of people are going to die.
It's going to be horrible.
It's going to be Armageddon.
And my, you know, having a flock of sheep is not going to stop that.
But holding aside really truly catastrophic, you know, Noah's Ark type situations, I think the range of possibilities are basically...
If we're seeing collapse of empire, American empire, which I think we are, not necessarily the collapse of the American state, but the collapse of the American empire, I think my whole life, basically, the American consumerist experience has been based on essentially free or low-cost goods in everything, whether it's food or housing or everything was really cheap.
Or really easy to get.
And I think if just that period is ending and nothing else, then we're in for a major shock.
Culturally, a major shock.
Maybe a lot of the rest of the world isn't.
We are.
Now, on top of that, unfortunately and sadly, I think World War III, whatever you want to call it, is inevitable.
I think the U.S., without going too deep in this rabbit hole, the U.S. debt...
I mean, when empires rack up too much debt, the only thing left for them to do to save it usually is war, and then that doesn't save it.
There was a point where the U.S. debt was totally saved, definitely during the Clinton administration, and maybe even as recently as the Obama administration.
If the Fed had refinanced...
Or a huge amount of national debt when the interest was essentially zero, we'd be in a very different situation.
But they didn't.
And so that plus the massive stimulus bill, stimulus bills, what they were was graft.
But that plus the response to COVID, they were past the point in overtime.
And so what happens when government defaults?
War.
And then a lot of other consequences from that.
So I don't know the details.
No one does.
Because I think there's a lot of ways it could play out.
I just want to ensure, regardless of what happens up to a certain point, that me and my family and my community can endure that.
Because I don't think it's going to last forever.
Disasters and emergencies don't last forever.
There's another side.
I actually think America is really well set up.
To come out the other end of that in a really positive place, it's just going to be painful to get there.
So here's one potential mid- to short-term outcome, which is that we continue pushing for war with Iran, which apparently doesn't yet have nuclear weapons.
We do.
Israel does.
The whole coalition arrayed against Iran has them.
To consume resources and status and what basically most of our parents were.
The house in the suburbs, I'm going to have these vacations, I'm going to go to these places, I'm going to have this rank in my society.
It's an externally...
Created identity, right?
Because what do you even know what to consume, right?
It's what your screen, what your media tells you is important and what you should be consuming.
Where's your status come from?
What matters?
What car is cool or not?
What clothes are cool or not?
That's a consumerist mindset, right?
Of course, I'm American, so I was deeply enmeshed and immersed in that growing up.
But the more...
One of the great travesties, I think, of the last 30 years is that the conservation movement and the environmental movement weren't one and the same.
They were kind of enemies for a long time.
And I think, though, now you're starting to see the permaculturists and the regenerative agriculture and the hunters and the conservationists really come together and realize we're all on the same side, right?
And I am a big believer, like, I mean, like your studio, right?
In harmony with not just my family and my community, but the environment around me, the soil around me, the grass, nature.
And everyone says that, but not many people actually do that.
They live a life that is divorced from the actual soil around them and the trees around them and the animals around them.
And the last two years, if you'd asked me two years ago if I live in harmony with nature, I'd be like, yeah, I like to think I do.
I didn't at all.
And I had no idea what it even meant to live in harmony with nature.
And having a homestead, what's so awesome about having a homestead is that it has forced me to live in reality.
You can have your phone and consumerist mindsets, you can live in abstraction.
Everything is abstract.
But when you live, whether having a homestead or a ranch or a farm or hunting, you have to actually pay attention to reality or nothing works.
Nothing.
Right?
And it has grounded me in a way that I thought I was grounded, but I wasn't.
And that's a huge reason why I wanted to get on land.
My wife and I wanted to get on land is because we craved that in our lives.
As we did emotional work and dealt with our issues, we felt the divorce from the world and wanted to get more integrated into the natural world, but then also wanted to raise our kids that way.
So that they never had to be divorced from that and had to find their way back to it.
The whole point of public school is to separate the child from the family and orient them in bureaucratic, corporatist, consumerist society.
I'm kind of torn because I like electricity and I like cool stuff and I'm not hunting with a bow and arrow, but at the same time, I don't want I don't want all of the negative nonsense that comes with that.
Just two days ago, some friends of mine were looking at one of my book covers, and the dude was like, what are you, a vampire?
You look like you haven't aged.
I'm like, no, I've aged.
But unlike most people in our society...
I have been eating healthy for the last 20 years.
And most people, like you look at, I can't, I'm 48. Most 48-year-olds are, 48-year-old men are a minimum of 30 pounds overweight, can barely do push-ups or pull-ups, are close to death, like metabolically are pre-diabetes, right, are horribly unhealthy.
I don't even think I'm in that great of shape.
I just don't eat the poisonous stuff.
I just paid.
I'm like, okay, I'm going to try and only eat meat for my homestead.
And like, I, you know, I'm metabolically, if you look at all the markers, like my genetic age is like in the 20s.
I don't do anything that special, man.
I'm not like out, you know, working out six hours a day or any nonsense like that.
I just eat healthy.
And healthy means like I know where all my meat comes from.
All the lamb and chicken I eat, born on my ranch, raised on my ranch, killed on my ranch.
Processed on my ranch, butchered on my ranch, eaten on my ranch.
I literally thought we went to church to eat donuts and socialize.
I didn't know anyone believed that because it was preposterous to me.
If you look at it reasonably and rationally.
And then it was about four years ago.
It's funny.
I drank a lot.
Never done any drugs in my life, ever, until I found part of my therapeutic protocols, I did psychedelic medicine, right?
Like MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, but with a guide and not recreationally.
I don't know how you do that stuff.
People who take LSD and go to concerts, I took LSD and cried and found God.
And the experience for me was not talking to God.
I felt the oneness of all things, and I felt the connection to all things.
And I felt, I understood, like, I knew Jesus' and Buddha's teachings academically, but then I was like, it was one very specific experience.
It was LSE. And I remember thinking, oh, fuck, the kingdom of heaven is within.
Now I know what Jesus was talking about.
Like, and if you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him.
Like, oh, now I know what Buddha was talking about.
And I have a really good friend who's Mormon.
And he's the type of Mormon that, like, You know, you meet some Christians and they just have that energy and glow and you're like, if all Christians were like this, like the world would be...
And I called him two days after my thing and I'm like, Ben, when you say you have a relationship with God, you mean that literally.
Like, it's an experience for you.
He goes, bro, I've been trying to tell you this for a decade.
And I'm like, I thought you were stupid.
I thought you were fooled.
I thought you just read the words and got fooled by them.
What you have is the actual spiritual connection.
He's like, yeah!
And I did not understand religion.
I didn't understand spirituality or belief in God until I had the experience.
And for me, I had to get there on psychedelics.
I don't really feel like I do now.
Psychedelics were important to open me up, but now I think I have enough of a connection to source, to God, whatever you want to call it.
I'm very, very much a God guy, but not in the way most God guys are.
Like, not a religious way.
Like, I think religious dogma, some people need it, and they like it, and that's cool.
I don't need dogma.
I think dogma gets in the way, and I think if you actually look at the teachings of Christ, and definitely the teachings of Buddha, they say the same thing.
That the dogma is not the thing, and is, in fact, in the way.
Although Buddha will say, he says that, but he's like, you know, I'll give you the eightfold path and all that to help you, but then you shed it when it's time.
Do you think, I don't know, maybe I'm imagining it, but it does seem like the people in charge do a lot to discourage these kinds of thoughts, these conversations, people coming together to have these conversations.