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

Speaker 1 The second half of the basketball season is here, and the race to the playoffs continues on Prize Picks, the best daily fantasy sports app to cash in on your favorite sports.

Speaker 1 The app is simple: pick more or less on at least two players for a shot to win up to a thousand times your cash.

Speaker 1 Download the PrizePicks app today and use code FIELD and get $50 instantly when you play $5. That's code FIELD on PrizePicks to get $50 instantly when you play $5.

Speaker 1 Win or lose, you'll get $50 for just playing. Guaranteed.
Prize Picks. Run your game.
Must be present in certain states. Visit PrizePicks.com for restrictions and details.
details.

Speaker 3 Welcome to the Tucker Carlson podcast, where every story is an honest story, and not one of them has been massaged, influenced, or censored by a corporate gatekeeper. We've made a lot of these.

Speaker 3 You can find all of it and a lot of exclusive content at tuckercarlson.com. We hope you'll check that out.

Speaker 2 Here's today's episode.

Speaker 3 About 20 years ago, a recent law school graduate called Tucker Max started posting his experiences,

Speaker 3 the details of his dating life on the internet. He became a sensation.

Speaker 3 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 liked Tucker Max.

Speaker 3 A lot of people hated Tucker Max, but nobody could deny that he was smart.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He stopped writing about that stuff and receded from public view.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Tucker Max joins us in studio now. Tucker Max, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. It was great to meet you.
Yes, you too.

Speaker 3 So I just have to add, mostly I want to hear about what you're doing now, but I just have to ask, how did you wind up? You went to University of Chicago undergrad?

Speaker 3 Famously, the least fun school in America. It's earned its reputation.
It's earned its reputation. And then you went to Duke Law School, which is a douche factory, obviously.
No, it is. I can't argue.

Speaker 3 But then you wrote these accounts of your life, which sounded like you were in a fraternity at Alabama. Yeah.
Like, how did this happen?

Speaker 3 Well, it's the benefit of going to the least fun undergrad is I didn't have any of my experiences in college when I was too young to appreciate how fun they were.

Speaker 3 And I kind of started having them in law school when, you know, because I got to law school. I graduated in three years from Chicago.

Speaker 3 And the cool part about Chicago is I got to law school and I'd basically already learned, you know, the hard parts of law school. So I was like, well, this is easy.
I don't need to go to class.

Speaker 3 Like, I know all of this. I know how to think.
All the stuff law school is supposed to teach you already learned. And then I had all my friends were dudes who went to state schools.

Speaker 3 They were the smart kids at state schools, like Kansas or Pitt or UVA. And so I 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.

Speaker 3 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 like 65%.
No dudes at UNC.

Speaker 3 Well, the dudes are just like the fop, the iconic stereotype of the foppish southern frat boy types. Yeah.
And so for me, it was like hunting at a petting zoo. It was so easy.

Speaker 3 And we'd go over there and be beautiful girls and these douchebag idiot guys. And it was like, oh, this is great.
And so we had a great time. And then we all left law school, went to different cities.

Speaker 3 And I went to Florida and I hated it. Like this is.

Speaker 3 To work in a firm? No, I got fired from a big law firm called Femmeck and West in Silicon Valley. I got fired about three weeks into being a summer associate, actually, not even a full-time employee.

Speaker 3 And so I was essentially blacklisted.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The thing I did that caused them to fire me. And honestly, I'm not even mad at them.
They did what I would have done if I would have been a partner there.

Speaker 3 One of the senior female partners propositioned me, you know, like

Speaker 3 wanted to hook up with me. She was married.
Not that that meant anything to me at the time.

Speaker 3 Or to female lawyers, by the way. Well, not to her.
I don't know. I'm not going to say all that.
Not going to generalize.

Speaker 3 I'll handle the generalization here. To her, it didn't obviously mean anything.
And for some reason, I turned her down. And then told everyone about it, which is like the worst.

Speaker 3 If I had slept with her, I'd have been bulletproof. And if I just shut up, no one would have cared.
But I kind of did the the worst of all worlds. And so,

Speaker 3 you know, I was a liability. I mean, you can't have someone acting like that in a law firm.
Would turn down a partner's advance and then tell others about it.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's, I mean, the Bar Association could get involved at that point. That is a violation of ethics.
And of intelligence. Like, what's wrong with you? Why are you so dumb?

Speaker 3 There's a way to play this game and you're doing it totally wrong. And I was.
And so I, then I, that, okay, so even that wouldn't have blacklisted me from the legal profession.

Speaker 3 But I wrote two days before she propositioned me or before they fired me.

Speaker 3 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. What was the scene?

Speaker 3 We had like a charity auction and

Speaker 3 I got up and I took the mic from like 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.

Speaker 3 I can't afford this and I need this to stay at the firm. And like, it was like kind kind of like a funny, like, uh, it was like, you know, like the funny drunken person at a corporate event.

Speaker 3 Like, I really didn't go too far, but I went right up to that one. As a summer associate, the line is lower for you.
Right, exactly.

Speaker 3 Like they, they, even the managing partner thought it was hilarious. And so, uh, and I wrote an email about that, not about the female partner, sent that to my friends.
like on a Tuesday.

Speaker 3 And then like on Wednesday, I was fired. They didn't even wait to Friday.
They got a Wednesday. Smart.
Right. And so, of course, my friends are assholes.
And so they sent that to all their friends.

Speaker 3 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, the, you know, there's always legends about

Speaker 3 I was one of the legends that ended up turning it into. And was your plan at that point to spend your life in big law? Yeah, it was.

Speaker 3 It really was. I hate to say it.

Speaker 3 The god's honest truth is I was the worst kind of like, okay, so I was deciding out of undergrad whether to go to iBanking, management consulting or law like and i was that type of dude i had that seeking soul death no i i i was seeking status without merit which is what everyone in those professions is doing right and that's just the and i you could not have convinced me that it was not a viable or valuable path for my soul to go make a bunch of money for bullshit which is what you do in those professions.

Speaker 3 And I bought it. I bought the whole thing, Hookline, 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.

Speaker 3 The drunk at the work event part, who clearly did not want that. There was a part of me, you know, like some people, you know, like you'll be mass murderers who want to get caught.
Of course.

Speaker 3 Well, I was, I wanted to get. kicked.
I didn't have the truth.

Speaker 3 I'd 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.

Speaker 3 So I acted out out until they fired me and kicked me out of the profession. So when that email went throughout the tiny and very inward-looking legal world,

Speaker 3 what kind of response did you get?

Speaker 3 They almost didn't let me back, come back for my senior year or my third year at Duke. No.
Yeah. Like the, the, the, it got back to Duke.
Oh, of course. It got everyone.

Speaker 3 Like I, if I had wanted to stay in the legal profession, I would have had to be like a public defender. Like there was no, I'm serious.
No,

Speaker 3 no one was gonna not that low. A divorce attorney.
Maybe Jag. I might have been a Leader Jag officer.
That would have been it, man. Wind up like David French.
Hilarious.

Speaker 3 Sorry, that's so.

Speaker 3 I love legal jokes.

Speaker 3 So Duke was mad. So at this point, do you realize like

Speaker 3 the only reason she let me come back and finish my third year? I'm not really sure. I'm thinking of she generally just think she's the um the the lady that Duke makes the head of of the, yeah,

Speaker 3 I forget what

Speaker 3 her exact title was, but the only reason she let me back was because I promised not to walk at graduation.

Speaker 3 Like, I was going to graduate. And so it was like,

Speaker 3 basically, if I wasn't there at graduation, 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 i have the jd which i do but then also um i had such it was like my party years like everyone else's party years are in undergrad mine were in law school had you been in a fraternity in college no no it's pretty funny yeah i know you invented this genre of fraternity literature the new york times that i invented fratire and i wasn't in a frat and i didn't write satire it's memoir i wrote but that's the new york times right like they're gonna they know about genres anyway they're gonna get literally everything wrong course they are yeah so what did you decide to do with your life at this point i mean you're you're kind of out of options yeah it was um it was not a good situation for me because what where i was was i 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 uh some restaurants in florida and so um kind of the like i was still still kind of looking for the easy path, right?

Speaker 3 Like law,

Speaker 3 law, you know, and

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 the next coward path for me was the family business. And

Speaker 3 I kind of, I had never really wanted to go into restaurants or the family business. But now I'm like, well,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It took me six months instead of three weeks. How'd you get fired from the family business? Oh, that's a long story.
Basically,

Speaker 3 I was good at this. Now, I was good because it's restaurant business, right? And I'm smart now going.

Speaker 3 And if you're smart now going, 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

Speaker 3 I assumed that my dad wanted to run a good business. I didn't realize the business existed for my dad's ego.

Speaker 3 And so I got in and realized, oh, there's all kinds of people here who suck, who are stealing from him, who

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It turns out that company is giving my dad kickbacks.

Speaker 3 And then these 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.

Speaker 3 And so I essentially, but like a fool, just like I, you know, 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They rallied kind of the troops and got enough evidence against me that

Speaker 3 my dad picked them over me and I got fired. Amazing.
So now you're a graduate of two of the most prestigious schools in the country, but you're unemployed. You've washed out of school.

Speaker 3 And unemployable. So what do you do? Man, I was not in a good spot.

Speaker 3 It was, it was a hard time for me.

Speaker 3 And I was basically like,

Speaker 3 you know, bartending, you know, work like the kind of jobs that losers in their 20s get, that was me. Like I was a loser in my 20s, early 20s.

Speaker 3 And then I was at the same time, I was writing emails to all 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.

Speaker 3 So there was no social niche for me in South Florida, right? Because if you do Coke and you go to clubs,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 to my friends. And one of my friends,

Speaker 3 a guy, a great, you actually might even, do you know Sean Trendy, Real Clear Politics? Yeah. Okay.
So Sean went to law school with me and is a good friend of mine. He's a great dude.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And he's like, well, dude, look at

Speaker 3 the evidence, right? And so

Speaker 3 what a wise piece of advice.

Speaker 3 It was Sean that gave it to me. I'm a writer because of Sean Trendy.
Truly. Amazing.
Yes, it is 100% true. And so, or I took that path because of Sean.
I was already writing.

Speaker 3 I just wasn't envisioning that as a profession from your doing that. And so

Speaker 3 ended up putting my stuff on the first. Actually, no, I took like the five emails that my friends thought were the funniest.
I sent them to every publisher and every book agent in New York.

Speaker 3 Because at the time, publishing was still all in New York. And there was actually literally, this was 2000,

Speaker 3 2001, 2002. There's a physical book of like all the agents' addresses and all like their query stuff.
All right, because you're old enough to remember this. Yeah, very well.

Speaker 3 I probably sent out a thousand query letters, maybe between 500 and 1,000. I've got zero positive, literally zero positive response, you know, like 90% nothing, right?

Speaker 3 And then probably got like 50 form letter rejections.

Speaker 3 And I even got, like, I still have a couple of them, like some, a couple personalized rejections where like the editor was like, this is the worst thing I've ever read.

Speaker 3 You should never write even an email again. Like

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So I was getting my own emails forwarded back to me from people in other social circles who didn't know I had written them, being like, dude, you should read this. This is so funny.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, all right, so clearly I'm good at this. Like Sean was right.
These are funny to people who aren't friends.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They're all idiots. Like pretty much everyone in publishing is there because they're a failed writer.
It's not literally everyone, but almost. I didn't know that at the time.

Speaker 3 But I was like, all right, well,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 um 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 and hell

Speaker 2 Hate to brag, but we're pretty confident this show is the most vehemently pro-dog podcast you're ever going to see. We can take or leave some people, but dogs are non-negotiable.
They are the best.

Speaker 2 They really are our best friends. And so for that reason, we're thrilled to have a new partner called Dutch Pet.
It's the fastest growing pet telehealth service.

Speaker 2 Dutch.com is on a mission to create what you need, what you actually need, affordable quality veterinary care anytime no matter where you are. They will get your dog or cat what you need immediately.

Speaker 2 It's offering an exclusive discount, Dutch is, for our listeners. You get 50 bucks off your vet care per year.
Visit Dutch.com slash Tucker to learn more. Use the code Tucker for $50 off.

Speaker 2 That is an unlimited vet visit, $82 a year, $82 a year. We actually use this.
Dutch has vets who can handle any pet under any circumstance. in a 10-minute call.
It's pretty amazing, actually.

Speaker 2 You never have to leave your house. You don't have to throw the dog in the truck.
No wasted time waiting for appointments. No wasted money on clinics or visit fees.

Speaker 2 Unlimited visits and follow-ups for no extra cost, plus free shipping on all products for up to five pets. It sounds amazing like it couldn't be real, but it actually is real.

Speaker 2 Visit dutch.com slash Tucker to learn more. Use the code Tucker for 50 bucks off, your veterinary care per year.
Your dogs, your cats, and your wallet will thank you.

Speaker 4 A incredible nutritional supplement called Immuno150 is now available to the public.

Speaker 4 It contains 13 vitamins, 17 herbs, 18 amino acids, 17 antioxidants, 9 exotic fruits, COQ10, turmeric, and 70 plant-derived colloidal minerals.

Speaker 4 It may be the best health supplement in the world because of its 70 minerals. There's nothing like this amazing product.

Speaker 4 It supports the body with everything it needs to become healthy and stay healthy.

Speaker 4 Imuno 150 contains seven times more minerals and many more vitamins and enzymes than found in foods and most nutritional supplements.

Speaker 4 Imuno 150 can be ordered from Amazon or Walmart or call 844-519-3400. That's 844-519-3400 or visit the website immuno150.com.
That's I-M-M-U-N-O-150.com.

Speaker 3 How many books did you write? How many did you sell? I wrote four Fratzire books.

Speaker 3 One I kind of gave away for free, so it doesn't count, count, but three like were published. All three were, you know, New York Times bestsellers.

Speaker 3 I think I've sold about four and a half-ish million of those books. Yeah.
That's incredible. It was a lot.
I mean, because especially because my audience were essentially people who don't read.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I believe that. Like tens of thousands.
So when, why'd you, why'd you stop? And when did you stop?

Speaker 3 Because my books were my stories about doing all the dumb stuff guys and a lot of women also do in their 20s, drinking, hooking up, partying, all that stuff.

Speaker 3 And then by the time, you know, I started writing at 27. By the time I got to about 33, 34, I was like pretty tired of it.
You know, like.

Speaker 3 Drinking and partying and, you know, going out five nights a week is super fun when you're at a certain stage in life. And I was way past that stage of life.
And it was becoming tedious and tiresome.

Speaker 3 And the cost of that lifestyle was really, not just the physical cost, but the emotional cost was catching up to me. And

Speaker 3 honestly, man, 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that's, oh, dude, it was so depressing because all my fans would come to me. You know, I do public events all the time, speeches, whatever.

Speaker 3 And they were all really upset if I wasn't the Tucker Max they envisioned in their head. Right.
And at the time, I would get really mad at them. Like, fuck you.
I'm a whole person.

Speaker 3 But that was my own immaturity. Like, they liked me because of my stories and because of a certain

Speaker 3 attitude I had and 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.
Jagger has to sing satisfaction at every show. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I wasn't going to sing satisfaction the rest of my life. Like

Speaker 3 eventually, as I got,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They read the books, thought they were funny, didn't expect me to be. But that was 20%, right?

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so I wrote the last in the series was Assholes Finish First. And I put a like a retirement at the end where I'm like, I'm not going to write this stuff, talk about it anymore.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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, is your Tucker Max? And

Speaker 3 why aren't you, you know, drunk, screaming curses at people laying under a table? And I'm like, It's 11 a.m. on a Thursday.

Speaker 3 Like, what is wrong with you, dude?

Speaker 3 But even now, to this, to this day, a lot of people, their

Speaker 3 impression of me,

Speaker 3 uh, even after they meet me, is still how did you find a wife based on that?

Speaker 3 I mean, so you've like laid bare your personal life, yeah, and you've sold four and a half million copies of books about hooking up with various women, right?

Speaker 3 I told the truth about things most people don't ever tell the truth about, for sure. Yes, so

Speaker 3 like, what did that teach you about what you wanted in a wife?

Speaker 3 Um, well, it definitely showed me very much what I don't want. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because a lot of the, I mean,

Speaker 3 I was with a lot of women in that period. I was single.
I was into women. 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.

Speaker 3 And I realized,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 three or four years before I started,

Speaker 3 I retired, I would have been really happy with the hottest girl there was who was pretty sweet and basically

Speaker 3 a trophy wife, right? I would have been totally cool with that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That's the crazy thing, man.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know, it's 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.

Speaker 3 Because most guys

Speaker 3 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 a game.
You have to talk to them.

Speaker 3 You have to be good in some way, at least connecting with

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 women. And you can't understand what that's like as a dude, because you've spent your whole life.

Speaker 3 Like, imagine living on a desert island and you're scraping out an existence and you have food, but never enough.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And you're like, oh, and you're going to gorge yourself for a while or the best Vegas buffet you can ever, yeah, Golden Corral forever, right? You're going to gorge yourself for a while.

Speaker 3 In fact, you're going to gorge yourself until you throw up a few times, and then you're going to keep gorging yourself. And that was what my life was like.

Speaker 3 I would like because 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.

Speaker 3 There's still a scarcity until you become famous. And then they're in abundance.
But for women, penis is an abundance from the time that they probably pre-puberty for a lot of them, right?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 in that abundance for a while and wallow in it until it became, like all abundance, becomes sickening. And you have to kind of like all abundance, that's right.
Right.

Speaker 3 And you've got to really, okay, I don't want everything. There are,

Speaker 3 here's the things I, 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 lately will say, like, your intro is really good.

Speaker 3 Like, it seems like a 180-degree turnaround.

Speaker 3 And 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

Speaker 3 abundance and hedonism. I needed that.
It's just interesting that you had all the women you wanted, but you just wanted one. in the end.
Eventually, yes. Don't get me wrong.

Speaker 3 If my wife was cool with two or three, I might be all right with that too.

Speaker 3 But no, no, it was

Speaker 3 lots and lots of different women was not an effective way to fill the hole of loneliness. Yes, that's right.
For a while, I thought it worked, but it doesn't work long. No, it doesn't work.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 abundance doesn't work. But

Speaker 3 you could not have convinced me of that with any words when I was 29. Right.

Speaker 3 There's no, it's an age thing. No, it's totally right.
I've arrived at the same conclusion.

Speaker 3 But how did you get, okay, so now you are not just a husband and a father, but that's basically your job. Yeah, I sold my company.
It's all I do now.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 what motivated your desire to make that your life?

Speaker 3 Like, and what is homesteading and why did you do it? So

Speaker 3 I didn't come up with this goal ahead of time and then do it. I discovered this path as I walked it, right?

Speaker 3 So after I retired from writing, uh you know the stories of drinking and hooking up i retired from fratire um what ended up happening is I was still a really well-known author, and a lot of people came to me to help them write their books.

Speaker 3 So I started a company called Scribe that we, you know, David Goggins, I'm sure, we did his books, and Tiffany Haddish and some other people like that.

Speaker 3 And we did about from the time I started until when I left, which was 2022,

Speaker 3 like 2,000 books. And so we were kind of the premier, like independent ghostwriting publishing firm, right?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 we built a great company, 500 employees. Me and my co-founder, Zach,

Speaker 3 built a great company. And it was rewarding.
And I kind of went through the entrepreneurial phase of life.

Speaker 3 Before I thought I was entrepreneurial, but I was an artist. And being an artist and running a business with employees are totally different things.
Oh, I found out.

Speaker 3 Totally different things.

Speaker 3 And I did not understand. I only do one of those things, not the other.
Yeah. So

Speaker 3 there was a lot rewarding with it. And

Speaker 3 started the business. I met my wife first, then started the business.
And

Speaker 3 as the business grew and developed,

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 even though my kids are still pretty young, I was like,

Speaker 3 and then 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I just kind of realized, man, that as much as I did, I like business and I like entrepreneurship,

Speaker 3 I didn't love it. And I definitely didn't love it more than my wife or my kids.
And I realized like, what,

Speaker 3 I don't know when I came to to this realization,

Speaker 3 but I came to the realization that

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I'm stealing my father from their children.

Speaker 3 Or I've seen my children's father from them, which is me. And

Speaker 3 I decided I wasn't going to do that. Like that

Speaker 3 200 million or a billion dollars is not worth that 20 million isn't even

Speaker 3 it's not worth it but most people have this realization decide okay we're gonna we're gonna spend a year and sail to new zealand right but you decided to buy a homestead in texas yes and grow your own food raise your own food yeah why

Speaker 3 well um there were a couple reasons so uh you were around 2020 2021 yes so i don't have to describe all that but um well how did it affect you i mean you weren't working in politics, right?

Speaker 3 No, no, no, no. I wrote a piece on this on my blog about how I kind of thought I was awake to how the world worked.
Cause, you know, I'd work in the entertainment business. You have too.

Speaker 3 You understand media entertainment. And if you work in that business, you see behind the curtain and how messed up everything is.

Speaker 3 And I saw, I mean, I saw how evil Hollywood was long before the Me Too stuff. And I knew, like, everyone in Hollywood knew

Speaker 3 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 even thought.

Speaker 3 Like, I saw a little bit behind the curtain. That was a public health emergency.
Of course it was. Right.
Of course. And did you think that for a moment?

Speaker 3 Did you think any of this was just like what did

Speaker 3 you do? You grew up in this country. Tell us what you thought.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 when I was watching the videos of people dying in the street in China, like early March of 2020, there was a window of about, if I'm being honest, about six weeks I was probably fooled.

Speaker 3 Three to six weeks. Yeah, me too.
Right. Scary.
This might be legit. This might be an actual epidemic, a pandemic.
This might be like whatever. And so

Speaker 3 I was,

Speaker 3 you can actually look on my Twitter timeline. There's a, when

Speaker 3 South Buy 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.

Speaker 3 Like nothing about this seems right.

Speaker 3 And by May, I'm like, oh, well, this is a fraud. Like, this is clearly a fraud.
And then the riot started.

Speaker 3 And it was like, I mean, the iconic photo of the, you know, the, the, the, the, the CNN with the Chiron, you know, mostly peaceful protests and this fire in the background. It's like, come on.

Speaker 3 Like, I'm not.

Speaker 3 But if you're, I mean, if you, if you're rioting for racial justice, you're not going to spread a deadly virus, right? Obviously, of course.

Speaker 3 And well, my favorite were the people who was like, well, racial justice is deadlier than, or racial injustice is deadlier than COVID. I'm like, your racism is scarier than just stop.

Speaker 3 And that's when I was like, okay, okay. So this is,

Speaker 3 this is utter, total bullshit. And so then my wife and I had always talked about getting on land.
We'd always wanted to. Hold on, let me ask you to pause.
What did you conclude from that?

Speaker 3 So it was obviously this was fraudulent. This was a total fraud.
But like, why?

Speaker 3 Well, see, I mean, I went to the, you know, all the big schools. Like, I knew, I knew woke wasn't a shock to me.
I saw that coming for years.

Speaker 3 And in fact, I, I mean, I had a company that was 70% women and all creative. So you think we would have been infected early.
No, I saw it coming. I kept it out of Scribe.

Speaker 3 For as long as I was there, I was able to keep it out. It's really, it's actually, if you want

Speaker 3 a really easy trick to keep woke people away from your organization, there's a very simple way to do it.

Speaker 3 You just emphasize, make your primary value responsibility and your second accountability, and those people will go elsewhere. Because they're incompetent.
Not necessarily.

Speaker 3 Some of them are smart and capable. It's that the woke mind virus is about

Speaker 3 placing blame for your life on other people.

Speaker 3 So if everything is about first about responsibility and accountability, those people will not come to your organization. And so I was able to kind of shelter my world from that.
Oh, it works.

Speaker 3 It works beautifully.

Speaker 3 I was able to shelter my world from them pretty well.

Speaker 3 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 has clearly infected media and these people are fools.

Speaker 3 I didn't realize how corrupt, how truly catastrophically corrupt government was until January 6th of 2021.

Speaker 3 That was when That was, because 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And, you know, the way I looked at preparation and emergency stuff was a bug out place, right?

Speaker 3 And so we bought a beautiful house in the mountains, isolated, because that, that's where my level of consciousness and understanding was. Then January 21st happened.
And in real time. January 6th.

Speaker 3 Sorry, January 6th. January 6th of 2021.
And in real time,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it was like obvious that this was nonsense, that this was...

Speaker 3 in no way, shape, or form, anything approaching an insurrection.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But I did not truly internalize it until that moment. When you watch them tell you what you were seeing wasn't real.
And it was something totally else. Like, not

Speaker 3 media is always wrong, but just because they're wrong doesn't mean the opposite's true, right? So

Speaker 3 you have to kind of look in the direction that they're wrong. And in this case, the narrative that they were pushing was very clearly the narrative you push if you want to, if you want to create a

Speaker 3 fascist, communist, whatever, some form of totality, a police state. And

Speaker 3 I don't, all the evidence was there. You know, like.

Speaker 3 It's pretty common for you'll deny reality until all of a sudden the last piece of evidence clicks in and then all the other facts like oh shit i should i could have seen this a long time ago and i waited it was like that for me uh i mean you can make a good argument that the the republic fell um in america you can make an argument it fell during the whiskey rebellion yeah right you can make an argument several times 18th century definitely during the civil war lots of times in the 20th century yeah like when they murdered the president yeah

Speaker 3 lots of times uh jfk um I don't know when the American Republic fell, but it became very clear, undeniably clear to me on January 6, 2021, that we were not just an empire, but we were the late stages of an empire.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 3 I'd essentially missed

Speaker 3 understanding the American Empire was an empire. And

Speaker 3 I was like, oh, man.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Like I, for, I'm very, like all dudes, very interested in the Roman history and Mongolian history.

Speaker 3 And if you study the, the, 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, it was the Mongolian Empire was what we would consider a free place in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 for these Mongolians. And the transition from that to his sons and grandsons,

Speaker 3 less free?

Speaker 3 Very different. Yeah.
Yeah. It It was Empire Collapse.
And I'm like, this is exactly what's going on.

Speaker 3 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 it's the baseline of what's coming is going to be chaos.

Speaker 3 And we're going to see a lot more of what we saw, you know, broken supply chains.

Speaker 3 riots, whatever, right? Like that's kind of the best case scenario is just more of what we saw in 2020. And

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But there are groups of people who

Speaker 3 I think are pretty sophisticated. How long did it take for you to realize that your bug out place in the North Carolina mountains?

Speaker 3 January 1st, 2021.

Speaker 3 Is that right? So that's not adequate. Explain why that's not adequate.
Because, okay, when empire collapses, the thing that matters most is community.

Speaker 3 Who are you around?

Speaker 3 What skills do they have? What skills do you have? How well are you, can your group band together and endure the tumultuous chaos until some new state, steady state arises?

Speaker 3 And having a cabin in the woods is the opposite of community.

Speaker 3 Right? That was the

Speaker 3 old school American thought of prepping is really based on nuclear war and hiding a bunker and like, it's just nonsense. It's not really thought out.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Like there's a lot of, when the Roman Empire, not the Republic, when the Empire fell, there were lots of places that did great. Because, you know,

Speaker 3 some warlord or the local Roman general would just say, okay, like

Speaker 3 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.
And no disagreements allowed. No chaos.

Speaker 3 Lots of parts of Gaul thrived for thousands of years, hundreds, if not thousands of years after, because they had local rule, all the sorts of things that worked. Now, the Roman Empire fell.

Speaker 3 But for a lot of people

Speaker 3 in the aftermath of that, did really well.

Speaker 3 If they had great community right same with mongolia same with same with the in a lot of ways the british empire the british empire was a little different it was a more modern empire but the point is

Speaker 3 our my cabin in the woods had no community and so my wife and i

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 growing, raising your own food, taking responsibility for water, power, and food, but in the context of where a a lot of other people are doing the same.

Speaker 3 And so we knew we wanted to stay in Texas for a few reasons, and we ended up picking Dripping Springs.

Speaker 3 It's not the, there's a lot of like kind of towns in Texas that are doing things like this.

Speaker 3 Dripping's not the only one. It's the one that we like the best for a couple different reasons.
So we bought a homestead.

Speaker 3 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 a school.

Speaker 2 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Speaker 2 Well, with the name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at progressive.com.

Speaker 2 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.
Not available in all states.

Speaker 5 At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Speaker 5 Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

Speaker 5 From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Speaker 5 Black Friday deals are going on all month long. Save up to 45% off site-wide, plus an additional 10% off every order right now at blinds.com.

Speaker 2 Rules and restrictions apply.

Speaker 3 So what's the difference between a ranch and a homestead?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 generally speaking, a ranch is where you just like sort of raise livestock. But what we bought was, because I didn't know, right? I didn't really understand land.

Speaker 3 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. Like, and I mean, literally dead.

Speaker 3 The soil was dead. Everything was dead because the way he dealt with the land was very 20th century kind of mentality.
It was

Speaker 3 pesticides kill the bugs, herbicides kill the weeds, fertilizer raises the grass. Like

Speaker 3 that doesn't really work well. It works.
It can work sort of for a while in certain circumstances.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so, 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.
You know, everything was irrigated. It was, he had St.

Speaker 3 Augustine grass, which requires like 130 inches of rain a year in Texas, right? Like, so you're not getting 130 inches of rain in,

Speaker 3 but nonetheless, it's like, what, what are we doing? This doesn't make sense with our land and where we are.

Speaker 3 And so, the last two years I've spent essentially turning 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.

Speaker 3 And, you know, like, and now we have like,

Speaker 3 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, you know, garden,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We're hooked on the grid because why would we be independent before we have to be? But

Speaker 3 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 or very similar.

Speaker 3 They have similar values, similar approach to the world.

Speaker 3 You know, that's why

Speaker 3 we started a Waldorf school literally three minutes from our school. So for viewers who are not familiar with Waldorf, what is that? So there's lots of different educational philosophies.

Speaker 3 Acton, Montessori, public school.

Speaker 3 Waldorf is a philosophy that started in Germany like 150 years ago. And I think it is by far, of the educational philosophies, it's by far the best.

Speaker 3 It is the one that kind of feeds the emotional side.

Speaker 3 It kind of, it's like a Renaissance style, right? Where it kind of tries to help the whole child. Help create the whole child.
Of the educational styles, I think it's the best.

Speaker 3 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 because he doesn't have enough kids in his class for the Waldorf.

Speaker 3 Like there just aren't kids. He doesn't have a class there.
But the other two are Waldorf. Waldorf is the best by far if you're going to go to a school.
I'm on the fence about which is better.

Speaker 3 So all of your children are out of the public schools. Oh, never went into public schools.
My man, I would, I don't hate my kids. I'm never never going to send them to public schools.
And it

Speaker 3 raises a philosophical, and I want to put this to the President of the United States

Speaker 3 with a message that I think is relevant to you, which is that those are not your kids, actually. Here he is.

Speaker 3 Rebecca put a teacher's creed into words when she said, there's no such thing as someone else's child. No such thing as someone else's child.
Our nation's children are all our children.

Speaker 3 So your kids are really his kids. He owns your kids.
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.

Speaker 3 No, those are my kids. And those children are mine and my wife's.
Now, I will say,

Speaker 3 let's give it a very judicious

Speaker 3 interpretation. If what he means, and I don't think this is what he means, but if what he means is...

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That is. And you disagree with that.

Speaker 3 Disagreement's not strong enough. It's not.
It's not a strong enough term. Yeah.
Like I, I, there's just no chance that's going to exist in my worlds.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Just not.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 sexualize their kids, basically like kiddie porn shit with their kids, and they allow it.

Speaker 3 Why?

Speaker 3 Man, it's a good question. I don't know because clearly I would never in a million years allow anything like that.
I think most people can only give their kids what they got.

Speaker 3 And most people were raised by people who went to public schools and they went to public schools. And they were raised.

Speaker 3 Public schools are designed to create obedient uh employees yes like that that's the most charitable right uh uh um sort of interpretation it maintains the surf class that's the point it does that is that and i'm not saying this this isn't like a conspiracy theory or a metaphor like uh there's a guy john taylor gatto who wrote uh a couple great books about this um

Speaker 3 the literal stated goal horace mann all those people who invented the the the american public educational system their stated goal is to create subservient employees who know how to be good citizens.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 like, that's just,

Speaker 3 I didn't have children for that reason to serve some other man or woman or some faceless bureaucratic entity. No.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Why wouldn't they know better? You know,

Speaker 3 I can understand how

Speaker 3 a lot of people would get to that spot.

Speaker 3 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 they weirdly they gave me a great gift

Speaker 3 they weren't they were not good parents they um they weren't bad people they were just bad parents and but but their bad parenting gave me a gift they didn't pretend that they cared like they didn't mix a lot of oh seriously

Speaker 3 people laugh but i'm telling you man it so many people that was the that was the upside of my bad child. No, it was.
My parents didn't pretend they cared.

Speaker 3 So many people's parents or caregivers mixed love with abuse. And so so many people see those two things together.
My parents didn't really pretend they cared much.

Speaker 3 And so, like, I never mixed love and abuse. And also, they didn't really show up much for me.
And so I realized at a young age that the adults weren't coming. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And the adults, for the most part, didn't know what the hell they were doing. They didn't ever pretend they were experts or knew what they were doing or had the right answers, right?

Speaker 3 And so it's like they were so bad that in a way that they were good. They set me up to see the reality.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, it's I just love your attitude about your childhood.
That's a wonderful attitude to have.

Speaker 3 Well, I got there after a lot of emotional work, a lot of therapy, a lot of psychedelic medicine, a lot of work.

Speaker 3 I wasn't always like that. I was angry for a while.

Speaker 3 It's pointless to be mad about the past.

Speaker 3 Anger can serve a purpose for a period. If it gets you out of shame or other sort of essentially anti-life emotions, anger is a powerful motivating emotion.
But if you stay stuck there, it's not good.

Speaker 3 I was stuck there for a while. Is your wife totally on board with these attitudes? 100%.
Oh, yeah. My wife, I would not be married to her if she wasn't, if we didn't share these values.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But I've seen people who

Speaker 3 split in the last three, four years because their values just went differently. Like the split was already there, but this kind of forced it.

Speaker 3 So you've organized your life around surviving what you think is coming and protecting your healing.

Speaker 3 Not what's here now. So what do you think? And then what might come? What do you think might come? Like, what does that look like? I have no idea, right?

Speaker 3 The range of outcomes I think are extremely wide. But you're working to mitigate against those eventualities or those possibilities.
You can't prevent everything, right? Like

Speaker 3 if an asteroid hits, you know, Florida, nothing I'm doing is probably going to make any difference, right? Like, it's 95% of people are going to die. It's going to be horrible.

Speaker 3 It's going to be Armageddon. And my, you know, having a flock of sheep's not going to stop that.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 aside,

Speaker 3 holding aside really truly catastrophic, you know, Noah's Ark type situations,

Speaker 3 I think the range of possibilities are basically,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 my whole life, basically, the American

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 Unfortunately and sadly, excuse me, I think World War III, whatever you want to call it, is inevitable.

Speaker 3 I think the U.S.,

Speaker 3 without going too deep in this rabbit hole, the U.S. debt has gotten to the point where a war is necessary.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's all 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. It accelerates its decline.
Right.

Speaker 3 Exactly. 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.

Speaker 3 If the Fed had refinanced all of that 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.

Speaker 3 And so that plus the massive stimulus spill, stimulus bills, what they were was graft.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 that plus the response to COVID,

Speaker 3 they were past the point in overtime. And so what happens when government defaults?

Speaker 3 War,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Disasters and emergencies don't last forever. There's an other side.
I actually think America is really well set up to come out the other end of that in a really positive place.

Speaker 3 It's just going to be painful to get there.

Speaker 3 So here's one potential mid-to-short-term outcome, which is that we continue pushing for war with Iran,

Speaker 3 which apparently doesn't yet have nuclear weapons.

Speaker 3 We do, Israel does. The whole coalition arrayed against Iran has them.
They don't. So how do they respond? Well, maybe they just unplug the United States.
Maybe a cyber attack or EMP attack

Speaker 3 takes out

Speaker 3 our digital life. Totally possible.
So that would, you know, I can't even like to think about what that would look like, but where would that leave you on your homestead?

Speaker 3 Are you living a life that could withstand that?

Speaker 3 I'm not a huge believer. And now you have to be off-grid and you got to be living like the Amish.

Speaker 3 First off, off-grid doesn't exist. Even the Amish aren't off-grid.

Speaker 3 uh if you think about it like they don't mine their own ore and they don't smelt it right so uh not you know disparaging the amish uh like believe me i've like been man these dudes had some stuff figured out i didn't realize you're pro amish for the record maybe uh pro certain things uh uh about amish but um no i i don't think off-grid exists and i'm not a believer in oh you if you're not doing everything hand it doesn't work i don't i don't want to make my life hard for no reason that's nonsense I just want to make sure that there is a lot of coming political and social upheaval.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of political and social upheaval 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.

Speaker 3 I'm not trying to go be the Unabomber and live only off the land and only have things that

Speaker 3 ancient men had.

Speaker 3 If you want to do that, cool.

Speaker 3 I like electricity. But you're not making your own bombs like he does.
Dude, I like electricity. I like air conditioning.
I live in Texas. I really like air conditioning.
It's pretty crucial for us.

Speaker 3 I like modern conveniences. I want to continue using those as much as possible and that makes sense.
But I also,

Speaker 3 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 Goldman Sachs or go to law school unless you are deep in the consumerist mindset.

Speaker 3 I think that one of the major psychological shifts I've made is I have gotten out of the consumerist mindset to

Speaker 3 more of a

Speaker 3 like a shepherd mindset, right? And

Speaker 3 I think it's one of the travesties that. Can you just flesh it out a little bit? When you say consumerist mindset, what do you mean? Consumerist mindset means I live

Speaker 3 to consume

Speaker 3 resources and status and like my, what are basically our, most of our parents were.

Speaker 3 I want the house in the suburbs. You know, I'm going to have these vacations.
I'm going to go to these places. I'm gonna have this rank in my society.

Speaker 3 It's it's an externally uh uh created identity, right? That consumer, because what do you even know what to consume, right?

Speaker 3 It's what your screen, what your media tells you is important and what you should be consuming. Where's your status come from?

Speaker 3 Where, you know, what matters, what car is cool or not, what clothes are cool or not. That's a consumerist mindset, right?

Speaker 3 I, of course, I was American, so I was deeply enmeshed and immersed in that growing up. But the more,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I am a big believer, like

Speaker 3 your studio, right? Like, I really want to live in harmony with not just my family and my community, but the environment around me, the soil around me, the grass, nature.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 it has forced me

Speaker 3 to live in reality.

Speaker 3 You can have your phone and consumerist mindsets, you can live in abstraction. Everything is abstract.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 My wife and I wanted to get on land is because we craved that in our lives.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 so that they never had to be divorced from that and had to find their way back to it, right? Like I, the whole point of public school is to separate the child from the family and orient them in

Speaker 3 bureaucratic corporatist consumerist society. And I mean, like, I'm kind of torn because like, I like electricity and I like cool stuff.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The way our children grow up, first and foremost, your body, your rules. Second, like literally every,

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Then I'm like, okay, all right, we got to figure. 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,

Speaker 3 I didn't realize how poisoned and how toxic almost everything in our culture is. Not just American, the world.
Like the way humans relate to each other.

Speaker 2 You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food. Our food supply is rotten.
It didn't used to be this way. Take chips, for example.

Speaker 2 You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out of bed the next day. And the change, of course, is chemicals.

Speaker 2 There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body. Seed oils, for example.

Speaker 2 Now, even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat,

Speaker 2 totally passive and out of it. But there is a better way.
It's called masa chips. They're delicious.
I've got a whole garage full of them.

Speaker 2 They're healthy, they taste great, and they have three simple ingredients, corn, salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow. No garbage, no seed oils.
What a relief.

Speaker 2 And you feel the difference when you eat them, as we often do. Snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy at convenience stores.

Speaker 2 You feel satisfied, light, energetic, not sluggish. Tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips.
It's endorsed by people who understand health. It's well worth a try.

Speaker 2 Go to masa, m-as-s-a-chips.com slash tucker. Use the code Tucker for 25% off your first order.
That's masachipips.com

Speaker 2 Tucker. Code Tucker for 25% off your first order.
Highly recommended.

Speaker 2 Breaking news, news, Beam's cyber sales open for early access to the people who listen to this show, the select few, their best offer for the year. It lasts for 48 hours.

Speaker 2 Listeners of this show get up to 50% off by using the code Tucker. That means you can get Beam's Dream Powder for just $32.50.

Speaker 2 That's only $1.08

Speaker 2 per night for the best sleep you ever had. Visit shopbeam.com slash Tucker.
Use the code Tucker. This is the lowest price Dream has ever been sold anywhere.
Don't miss out. Probably sell out fast.

Speaker 2 Dream is packed with ingredients your body needs to sleep.

Speaker 2 Natural ingredients, nothing weird, magnesium, melatonin, but dosed intelligently, not like the drugstore garbage that knocks you out and leaves you groggy. It's like a head injury.
Totally different.

Speaker 2 Better. Visit shopbeam.com slash tucker.
Use the code Tucker. Get up to 50% off during Beam Cyber sale.
You can grab Dream for just $32.50,

Speaker 2 but only until it sells out. Think about it.
How much would you pay to get a great night's sleep? Eight hours uninterrupted with Beam Cyber Price, $1.8 cents per night. Shopbeam.com/slash Tucker.

Speaker 2 Shopbeam.com slash Tucker.

Speaker 3 Give me an example when you say poisonous. What do you mean?

Speaker 3 Food. You want to talk about food? Yeah.
All right. So

Speaker 3 virtually everything you find in a grocery store is at best unhealthy, at worst, literal poison. Like my favorite example,

Speaker 3 most people in America now for cooking use seed oils, canola oil. Canola oil was literally invented as a lubricant for machines.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 A huge reason that we wanted a homestead and to raise our own meat and our own vegetables is because it's it's really hard to get healthy food anywhere.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Even at Whole Foods, unless you're on the outer rim, right? Unless you're picking a head of lettuce or something like that.

Speaker 3 If it's in a package, Something like, I forget 70 plus percent of stuff in packages in Whole Foods has seed oils in it. And it's poison.
It's absolute poison.

Speaker 3 And do you feel the difference having gotten off it? I mean, I'm 48 years old.

Speaker 3 It's just two days ago, some friends of mine were looking at one of my book covers and the dude was like, you look like, what are you, a vampire? Like, you look like you haven't age.

Speaker 3 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 look, I can't, I'm 48.

Speaker 3 Most 48-year-olds are, 48-year-old men are a minimum of 30 pounds overweight,

Speaker 3 can't, can barely do push-ups or pull-ups,

Speaker 3 are

Speaker 3 close to death, like metabolically are pre-diabetes, right? Are horribly unhealthy. I don't even think I'm in that great a shape.
I just don't eat the poisonous stuff.

Speaker 3 I just pay it. I'm like, okay, I'm going to try and only eat meat from my homestead.

Speaker 3 And like, I, you know, I'm metabolically, if you look at all the markers, like my genetic age is like in the 20s.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And healthy means like I know where all my meat comes from.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's as it's as God intended. What goes in it is grass

Speaker 3 and water or bugs if it's chickens. That's it.

Speaker 3 You mentioned God offhandedly.

Speaker 3 Has your view of the eternal changed? Radically. Really? Radically.

Speaker 3 So at 20,

Speaker 3 I think at a certain point in your life,

Speaker 3 if you are educated and you believe in God,

Speaker 3 this is going to be controversial. I don't mean it bad.
I think you're stupid. If you're not an atheist at some point early on in your life, because

Speaker 3 I don't believe you can reason your way to God no yeah I know St.

Speaker 3 Augustine I love whatever I'm with you and you know Thomas More okay fine I don't buy I just don't think you get to God from reason and so I was atheist my whole life because

Speaker 3 God never made sense if you think logically

Speaker 3 I grew up actually in the Episcopal Church like I was an acolyte in the Episcopal but you know Episcopal church is like a social club it's not you don't yes I'm very familiar with it yes you know like 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.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 it was about four years ago.

Speaker 3 It's funny. I had never done, I drank a lot, never done any drugs in my life ever until I found

Speaker 3 part of my therapeutic protocols, I did psychedelic medicine, right? Like MDMA.

Speaker 3 LSD mushrooms, but psychedelic, like 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.

Speaker 3 And it was the experience for me was not like talking to God. It was,

Speaker 3 I felt the oneness of all things and I felt the connection to all things. And I felt

Speaker 3 I understood. Like I knew Jesus's and Buddha's teachings academically.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 if you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him, like, oh, now I know what Buddha was talking about.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And you're like, if all Christians were like this, like, the world would be, I don't know what you're into, but I want to know more.

Speaker 3 He's one of those guys. And I called him two days after my thing, and I'm like,

Speaker 3 Ben,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I did not understand religion. I understood,

Speaker 3 I did not 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.

Speaker 3 Psychedelics were important to open me up, but but now I think I can, I have enough of a connection to source, to God, whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 3 I'm very,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 that the dogma is not the thing and is in fact in the way.

Speaker 3 Although Buddha will say, he says that, but he's like you know i'll give you the the eightfold path and all that to help you but then you shed it when it's time does is your wife in the same place you are i think pretty much yeah how's it changed your life

Speaker 3 i mean that's like uh because because that's like a different way of seeing in every in every single way i i i got past consumerism because of this um because once you once you realize not realize intellectually once you feel the oneness and some people can get there like at church some people get there with yoga yoga.

Speaker 3 I'm not saying my way is better or worse. It's just the way.
Once I felt the oneness of all things,

Speaker 3 all of the frivolities and the nonsense and the lies of the modern narrative fell away. And then for me, it was like, oh, of course,

Speaker 3 of course, being connected to land matters. 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm a human and it's a chicken, right? But 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.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 if that's true, then my entire approach before, that's what's toxic, seeing myself as separate from this system, as different than the system.

Speaker 3 No, that's just not true. Do you think,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They're very against religious faith. Everything I just said is absolutely,

Speaker 3 completely, catastrophically counter to all things government

Speaker 3 in all ways, shapes, and forms. I don't think it's an accident that the reigning governmental power at the time killed Jesus.
I don't think it's

Speaker 3 an accident that anyone who preaches anything like this comes crossways of power because most organized power tells you, however, they frame the message, the message from organized power is you need me.

Speaker 3 You need me. That's right.
And the message from Jesus and from God, just stick with Christianity, is you don't need them.

Speaker 3 I knew I'd never met you before. Yeah, we've never.
And I, and I, and I have a ton of daughters, so, and I did when you were writing your books and,

Speaker 3 you know, whatever. I wasn't living that kind of life, but I could tell you were a deep person.

Speaker 3 Even reading, I hope they serve beer and hell.

Speaker 3 Not to brag, I turned out to be right.

Speaker 3 Tucker Max, thank you for spending all this time. Yeah, that was great.
Thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson podcast. If you liked it, be sure to hit subscribe and leave a review.
And remember, we only release some of our interviews this podcast.

Speaker 3 The only place you can get all of it, including past episodes, is tuckercarlson.com, and we hope you will.