Author Tucker Max left behind a wild life of partying to settle down on a Texas homestead with his wife and kids.

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 bestselling 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. Tucker Max joins us in studio now. Tucker Max, thank you so much.

And the cool part about Chicago is I got to law school, and I basically already learned the hard parts of law school. So, I was like, well, this is easy. I don't need to go to class. Like, I know all of this. I know how to think.

All the stuff law school is supposed to teach you, I already learned. And then all my friends were dudes who went to state schools. They were the smart kids at state schools, like Kansas, or Pitt, or UVA. And so, it was like, and they knew how to party, and I'm like, oh, I didn't have anyone like you guys with me in undergrad. Let's go do this more.

And then, of course, we were by UNC, which was all girls. It's not literally an all-girls school, but it might as well be. No, it is. It's like 65% girls.

And so, we had a great time. And then, we all left law school, went to different cities, and I went to Florida, and I hated it. Like, this is...

It's impossible to get fired, and I did it in three weeks. Basically, I was an unguided missile, man. I was drunk at all the firm events. I did all that stuff. That actually wasn't the problem.

The thing I did that caused them to fire me, and honestly, I'm not even mad at them. They did what I would've done if I would've been a partner there. One of the senior female partners propositioned me, you know, like, wanted to hook up with me. She was married. Not that that meant anything to me at the time.

And so, you know, I was a liability. You can't have someone acting like that at a law firm.

And so, I.

. Then I... Okay, 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. I sent it to my friends.

And I need this to stay at the firm. And like, it was like, kind of like a funny, like, it was, like, you know, like the funny drunken person at a corporate event. Like, I really didn't go too far, but I went right up to that line.

Not about the female partner. Sent that to my friends, like on a Tuesday. And then, like on Wednesday, I was fired. They didn't wait till Friday. They got a Wednesday.

Smart. Right. And so, of course, my friends are assholes. And so they sent that to all their friends and then it, like, went out from there. And so that, like everyone in the legal profession, got that email that summer.

Like I was the.

. You know, there's always the legends about... I was one of the legends that ended up turning it into...

Like, and I was that type of dude. I had that mindset.

Which is what you do in those professions. And I bought it. I bought the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker. And so I was going after that. But I think there was obviously a part of me, like the...

Whatever you want to call it.

I wanted to get.

. I didn't have... The truth... 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.

no.

. I'm serious. No... No one was going to...

. You're speaking of she generally? Just the big she? No, no, no.

. Yeah. I forget what her exact title was. 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 at grad... 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'm 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 in undergrad, mine were in law school.

law, you know, and I banking and management consulting, even though you're working hundred something hour weeks, they really are the easy path. They are the soulless, easy, coward path. And so the next coward path for me was the family business. And I kind of, 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. It took me six months instead of three weeks.

And so I was good at it. The problem was, um, 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, who, uh, we, 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 companies give my dad kickbacks and then these people who are incompetent, stealing from him, you know, uh, feed my dad's ego in a way that he values way more than what they're stealing. And so I, essentially, but like a fool, just like I, I, you know, didn't sleep with a partner and told everyone I went in, recognize, 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, like, I, told them that they sucked and that I was going to get them fired, and you know, they were smart enough and knew my dad well enough. They rallied kind of the troops and got enough evidence against me that, that, uh, my dad picked them over me and I got fired.

And then I was, at the same time I was writing emails to my friends from law school about all, you know, living in South Florida, which is a soulless, horrible place, cause I don't do drugs and I'm not old. So there was no social niche for me in South Florida. Right. Cause, if you do Coke and you go to clubs, South Florida is 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 getting these horrible situations and write emails about it and send them to my friends. And one of my friends, uh, a guy, a great, you actually might even, do. you know Sean Trendy at Real Queer Politics? Yeah. Okay.

So Sean went to law school with me and is a good friend of mine. He's a great dude. And he actually called me up and he was getting the emails and he's like, dude, listen, you're not good at law. You're not good at business, clearly, but these emails are the funniest things I've ever read. You need to go be a writer.

And I was like, what the, like, what kind of bitch shit is this? What are you talking about, Sean? This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And he's like, well, dude, look at the evidence. Right.

And so, um, what a wise piece of advice that it was Sean that gave it to me. I'm a writer because of Sean Trendy. Truly. Like he said. It is a hundred percent true.

And so, or I took that path because of Sean, I was already writing. I just wasn't envisioning that as a profession for me or doing that. And so, um, I, uh, I ended up putting my stuff on the first, actually, no, I took like the five emails that my friend saw were the funniest. I sent them to every publisher and every book agent in New York, because at the time, publishing was still all in New York and there was actually literally, this was 2000,, 2000,, 2001,, 2002.. There's a physical book of, um, like all the agents, addresses and all like their query stuff.

Cause you're old enough to remember this.

You should never write even an email again. Like you have no place in publishing. But at the same time I was sending my emails, like all the emails I'd forwarded to my friends would get like, they would forward those, like not just the ones that got me fired, but the funny ones after. And I was getting my emails forwarded back to me. Remember, early in internet email chains?

Yeah. Okay. So I was getting my own emails forwarded back to me from people in other social circles who didn't know I'd written them. be like, dude, you should read this. This is so funny.

And I'm like, all right. So clearly I'm good at this. Like Sean was right. These are funny to people who weren't friends. I'm like, all right.

I mean, it is arrogant to think this, but all these people in publishing are wrong. Now, now I've, now I know publishing, I'm like, of course they're all wrong. They're all idiots. Like pretty much everyone in publishing is there because they're a fail, a failed writer. It's not literally everyone, but almost.

I didn't know that at the time, but I was like, all right, well, I'm not good. They're not going to publish me. But then the internet was a thing at the time, this is 2002.. And so I had to learn to program HTML. I put up a site on GeoCities, if you remember GeoCities.

And it's like a, I got featured on, like college humor and a few other, like those humor blogs that were really, really early and it blew up. And MTV came and did a documentary about people who were dating on, because back when, like dating on the internet was weird and creepy and all. And so they did a documentary about me and that blew up. And then all the publishing companies came back and they were like, we want to do your, write your books. And then that became, I hope they serve beer in hell.

Subscribe and download your episodes. wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

How many books did you write? How many did you sell?

And the cost of that lifestyle was really not just the physical cost, but the emotional cost was catching up to me. And I'm honestly, man, like, like everyone who goes through, some people go through that phase for a week and some do it for a decade. I was more towards the decade side of it, but it was, um, I was feeling stuck, man. Like you can't move on at life if you have to be this person that is doing a thing at a certain phase. Right.

And that's, oh dude, it was so depressing cause. all my fans would come to me and you know, I do public events all the time, speeches, whatever. And they were all really upset if I wasn't the Tucker Max they envisioned in their head. And at the time I would get really mad at them. Like, fuck you.

I'm a whole person. I, but that was my own immaturity. Like they liked me because of my stories and because of a certain, uh, uh, attitude I had in a certain way, I was in a certain part of my life. And some of them realized, oh, that's just part of his life.

They read the books out. 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 finished 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, like a younger kid or something, would come up to me and be like, Oh, it's your Tucker, Max. And I'm like, why aren't you, you know, drunk, screaming curses at people laying under a table. And I'm like, it's 11am on a Thursday, like what, what is wrong with you, dude, even, but even now to this, to this day, a lot of people, their impression of me, uh, even after they meet me is still, how did you find a wife?

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. Cause I, three or four years before I started, I, I retired, I would have been really happy with the hottest girl there was, who was pretty sweet and, and basically a trophy wife.

Yeah. Right. I would have been totally cool with that. Um, 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. Um, 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. Yeah. You know, it's. the metaphor I always use is imagine that like, cause 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, with a woman. But once you get famous, all that's out the window, like, you don't 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, uh, 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, like 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 and you live at the Chinese buffet and you're like, Oh, and you're going to gorge yourself for a while, or the best Vegas buffet you can ever.

women are always a scarcity. for you as a dude. It doesn't matter how rich or you are or how good looking you are, how smart you are. There's still a scarcity until you become famous. And then there, then they're an abundance.

But for women, penis is an abundance from the time that they probably pre puberty. for a lot of them, right? Like. there's always dudes around, you know, like, and so women can kind of understand that it was, I didn't understand that at all. And then I kind of had to revel in that abundance for a while and, and wallow in it until it became like all abundance becomes sickening and you have to kind of like all abundance.

Let me figure out what that is. So, in a lot of ways, the best, it's funny, people will say, like, your intro is really good. Like it seems like 180 degree turnaround in my, 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, uh, abundance and hedonism. I needed that.

that, um, we, you know, David Goggins, I'm sure we did his books, and Tiffany Haddish and some other people like that. And we, we did about from the time I started until when I left, which was a 2022, like 2000 books. And so we were kind of the premier, like independent ghostwriting publishing firm, right? And, uh, uh, uh, we built a great company, 500 employees, me and my co-founder, Zach, um, uh, built a great company and, um, it was rewarding and I kind of went through the, the entrepreneurial phase of life. Before I thought I was on channel, but I was an artist, and that being an artist and running a business with employees are totally different things.

Oh, I found out totally different things. And I did not understand one of those things.

And as my kids got older, um, even though my kids are still pretty young, I was like, and then I was in a lot of, uh, 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, 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, um, 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, um, 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. is, 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. Um, or I've seen my children's father from them, which is me. And um, I decided I wasn't going to do that. Like that, $200 million or a billion dollars is not worth that.

20 million isn't even worth it. It's not worth it.

And I knew, like everyone in Hollywood knew the Weinstein, Weinstein was a rapist. And like, I knew, I thought I understood, but then 2020 happened and the lockdowns happened and all this. And I was like, Oh, it's way worse than I ever thought. Like I saw a little bit behind the curtain, but that was a public health emergency. Of course it was.

Right. Of course.

I was like, Oh yeah, that was like March 15th of 2020.

. I was totally for that. And then at 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 riot started and it was like, I mean the iconic photo of the, you know, the, the, uh, the CNN with the Chiron, you know, mostly peaceful protests, there's fire in the background. I was like, come on.

I kept it out of scribe for as long as I was there. I was able to keep it out. It's really, it's actually, if you want to, uh, a really easy trick to keep woke people away from your organization, there's a very simple way to do it. You just emphasize, make your primary value responsibility and your second accountability. And those people will go elsewhere.

No, it works. It works beautifully. Um, uh, I was able to shelter my world from them pretty well. Uh, and so, once I saw all this, I just, at the time we're talking about summer 2020, I'm like, okay, the woke mind virus is clearly infected media and these people are fools. I didn't realize how corrupt, how truly catastrophically corrupt government was until January 6th of 2021..

That was when that was, cause. you know, my wife and I decided to buy land the summer of 2020 and we bought our house in Tennessee that I showed you that we talked about, right? And so, cause. at the time I like, I didn't really understand. I didn't think America was at the state it was yet.

And you know, the way I looked at preparation and emergency stuff was a bug out place. Right? And so we bought a beautiful house in the mountains, isolated cause that, that's where my level of consciousness and understanding was. Then January 21st happened. And in real, January 6th, sorry, January 6th, January 6th of 2021.

And I, in real time, I, I, you, just watched the feeds and I saw, I mean, cause 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.

And I don't, all the evidence was there. You know, like it's pretty common for you, you'll deny reality until all of a sudden the last piece of evidence clicks in, and then all the other facts are like, oh shit, I could have seen this a long time ago and I waited. It was like that for me. I mean, you can make a good argument that the Republic fell in America. You can make an argument, and it fell during the Whiskey Rebellion, right?

You can make an argument several times in the 18th century, definitely during the Civil War, lots of times in the 20th century.

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 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.

And then, once I got that, that was when my wife and I got serious about, like, okay, we need to actually get ready for what's coming. Because it's going to be, I don't know what's coming, but the baseline of what's coming is going to be chaos. And we're going to see a lot more of what we saw, you know, broken supply chains, riots, whatever, right? Like. that's kind of.

the best case scenario is just more of what we saw in 2020.

And so I kind of dove deep into the sort of prepper world. Most of it's nonsense. Most of it are clowns who don't know what they're talking about. But there are groups of people who I think are pretty sophisticated.

And having a cabin in the woods is the opposite of community. Right? That was the old school American thought of prepping is really based on nuclear war and hide in a bunker and like, 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.

Right? Like there's a lot of when, the, when the Roman empire, not the Republic, when the empire fell, there were lots of places that did great. because, uh, you know, you can, some warlord or the local Roman general would just say, okay, like the, uh, we're, 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.

It was a more modern empire. But the point is our, my cabin in the woods had no community. And so my wife and I were like, how do we, where can we go to find community? How do we build a community? And he starts by not a cabin in the woods, but by, 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, we, we knew we wanted to stay in Texas for a few reasons. and, um, 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 it was beautiful, beautiful oak trees and rolling pasture, but it was dead. Like, and 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, uh, uh, pesticides, pesticides, kill the bugs, herbicides, kill the weeds, fertilizer raises the grass.

Like that doesn't really work. well. It works. 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.

And so what we had to do was stop all chemo. I had to fire all the people he had that were working there, the landscapers or whatever, you know, everything was irrigated. It was, he had St. Augustine grass, which requires like 130 inches of rain a year in.

we have, uh, you know, garden, um, we're starting to put in all kinds of stuff. And so we're totally independent water, totally independent meat, totally independent. We can be totally independent. power. We're hooked on the grid, because why would we be independent before we have to be?

But, um, we have a system where we can endure a lot of chaos and be totally fine. And we're surrounded by people in our community who are for the most part in the same position, are very similar. They have similar values, similar approach to the world. Um, you know, we, that's why we started, we started a Waldorf school, literally three minutes.

Where it kind of tries to help the whole child, to help create the whole child. of the educational styles. I think it's the best. Um, that being said, I'm still not sure if organized schooling is right for kids or not. Cause right now we have one kid.

I'm homeschooling cause he doesn't have enough kids in his class for, for the Waldo. Like there's, just aren't kids here and have a class there. But the other two are Waldo. A Waldo is the best by far. If you're going to go to a school, I'm on the fence about which is better.

Now I will say, let's give it a very judicious 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. In no way, shape or form, do I think my kids should live their lives based on what I want.

They should live it on what they want. Totally on board. I see my job is to help them become full people 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 a really a communist, Marxist idea that children are the property of the state, that the citizens are the property of the state.

Just not.

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 are 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. But their bad parenting gave me a gift. They didn't pretend that they cared, like.

they didn't mix a lot of love, seriously. People laugh, but I'm telling you, man, so many people.

Yeah, I mean, it's true.

The split was already there, but this kind of forced it.

And my having a flock of sheep is not going to stop me. But holding aside really truly catastrophic 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, excuse me, 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, has gotten to the point where a war is necessary.

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. That goes down.

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 of no return. 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.

Maybe a cyber attack or EMP attack takes out our digital life.

Are you living a life that could withstand that?

First of all, off grid doesn't exist. Even the Amish aren't off grid. If you think about it, like they don't mine their own ore and they don't smelt it, right? So not, you know, disparaging the Amish, like, believe me, I'm like, man, these dudes had some stuff figured out. I didn't realize.

I just want to make sure that there is a lot of coming political and social appeal. There's a lot of political and social people. now. It's already happening. And I think it's going to get worse.

And I want to make sure that I'm in the best place possible to survive, that. I'm not trying to, to go, you know, be the Unabomber and live only off the land and only have things that, you know, like, uh, uh, ancient men had, like, that's. if you want to do that. Cool. I, I, I, I liked electricity, but you're not making your own bombs.

I like modern conveniences. I want to continue using those as much as possible. And that makes sense. But I also, if I had to say, the big shift I've made in my mindset, man, is that I was like when I was in college, you don't go work for a Goldman Sachs or go to law school unless you are deep in the consumerist mindset. I think that one of the major psychological shifts I've made is I've gotten out of the consumerist mindset to more of a, uh, uh, like a shepherd mindset.

Right. And, and I think it's one of the travesties that.

That consumer, 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, where, you know, what matters, what cars cool or not, what clothes are cool or not. That's a consumerist mindset, right? I, of course I was, 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 in 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, I, I am a big believer, like, I mean, like your studio, right? Like. I really want to live in harmony with not just my family and my community, but my environment around me, the soil around me, the grass, nature.

And everyone says that, but, like not many people actually do, that. They live a very, 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, I, 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, you can have your phone and consumerist mindsets, you can live in abstraction, right? Everything is abstract, but when you live, whether having a homestead or a ranch or 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. Right? The whole point of public school is to separate the child from the family and orient them in bureaucratic, corporatist, consumerist society. And I mean, like, I'm kind of torn because, like, I like electricity and I like cool stuff and I'm not like, you know, I'm not shooting with a bow and arrow, 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. I want my children to grow up on land with their hands in dirt, understanding first, self-knowledge above all things. And that is the opposite of what you learn in public. Everything public school is coming from. experts, obey, do what you're told.

Here's how life works. The way our children grow up, first and foremost, your body, your rules. Second, like literally every, their body, their rules. That's like, my kid at any point can basically stop anything going on saying, no, my body, my rules. I don't want to go.

I don't want to do that. And if it's not unsafe, right, then I'm like, okay, all right, we got a few. And so basic things like that, man, I just, I wasn't thinking about until two, three, four, five years ago, but having kids and getting on land, I didn't realize how poisoned and how toxic almost everything in our culture is. Not just American, the world's like the way humans relate to each other.

My favorite example, um, most people in America now for cooking use seed oils, canola oil. Canola oil is, was literally invented as a, a lubricant for machines. I mean, it was used, I forget the exact history of it, but it is machine lubricant. It is so toxic and horrible for the body, and it's in everything now. A huge reason that we wanted a homestead and to raise our own meat and our own vegetables is because it's really hard to get healthy food anywhere.

Even at farmers markets, sometimes it's hard to get it, but like, go find something in a grocery store that doesn't have a seed oil in it. It's almost impossible. Even at Whole Foods, unless you're on the outer rim, right? Unless you're taking a head of lettuce or something like that. If it's in a package, something like, I forget, 70 plus percent of, of stuff in packages in Whole Foods has seed oils in it and it's poison.

It's absolute poison.

But unlike most people in our society, I have been healthy for the last 20 years. And most people, like you look at, I look, 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 pushups 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 from 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 twenties, I don't, 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.

It's as God intended. What goes in. it is grass and water or bugs, if it's chickens, that's it.

I think you're stupid. If you're not an atheist at some point early on in your life, because you can't, I don't believe you can reason your way to God. No. Yeah, I know. St.

Augustine, whatever. I'm with you. And Thomas More. Okay, fine. I don't buy it.

I just don't think you get to God from reason. And so I was atheist my whole life, because God never made sense. If you think logically.

I, you know, it's funny. I had never done, I drank a lot, never done any drugs in my life ever, until I found, uh, part of my therapeutic protocols. I did a psychedelic medicine, right? Like MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, but psychic, like, with a guide and, 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 it was the experience for me was not like talking to God. It was, I felt the oneness of all things and I felt the connection to all things. And I felt, um, I understood, like I knew Jesus's and Buddha's teachings academically, but then I was like, it was one very specific experience. It was LSD.

And I remember thinking, oh, fuck, the kingdom of heaven is within. Now I know what Jesus was talking about. Like, and, and, 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 a, 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, I don't know what you're.

What you have is the actual spiritual connection. He's like, yeah. And I did not understand religion. I understood, 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 can, 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.

We're all energy. We're all part of the same system. I'm not different than this land or this chicken or this sheep. Yeah, I'm a human and it's a chicken, right, but we're all part, we're all parts of the same system. We're all parts of God.

And if that, if you want to call the system God, I'm on board. And if that's true, then my entire approach before, that's what's toxic. Seeing myself as separate from the system, as different than the system. No, that's just not true.

Yeah.