Welcome to the Tucker Carlson podcast, where every story is an honest story, and not one of them has been massaged or influenced or censored by a corporate gatekeeper. We made a lot of these. You could find all of it and a lot of exclusive content at tuckercarlson. Com. We hope you'll check that out. Here's today's episode. About 20 years ago, a recent law school graduate called Tucker Max started posting his experiences, the details of his dating life on the internet. He became a sensation. He wrote a bunch of best-selling books, sold millions of copies, the most famous of which was called I Hope They Serve Bier 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 and getting loaded, but he was. Then he retired around 2012. He stopped writing about that stuff and receded from public view. 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.Thanks.

For having me.It.

Was great to meet you.Yes, you too. 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? Yeah. Famously the least fun school in America?

It's earned its reputation.

It's earned its reputation. Then you went to Duke Law School, which is a douche factory, obviously.

No, it is. I can't argue.

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

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. I started having them in law school because I got to law school. I graduated in three years from Chicago. The cool part about Chicago is I got to law school and I basically already learned the hard parts of law school. I was like, Well, this is easy. I don't need to go to class. I know all of this. I know how to think. All this stuff law All school is supposed to teach, you already learned. Then all my friends were dudes who went to state schools. They were the smart kids at state schools like Kansas or Pitt or UPA. They knew how to party. I'm like, Oh, I didn't have anyone like you guys with me in undergrad. Let's go do this more. 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% girls.

No dudes at UNC.

Well, the dudes are just the the iconic stereotype of the foppish Southern frat boy types. For me, it was like hunting at a petting zoo. It was so easy. We'd go over there and be beautiful girls and these douchebag idiot guys. It was like, Oh, this is great. We had a great time. Then we all left law school, went to different cities, and I went to Florida, and I hated it.

To work in a firm?

No. I got fired from a big law firm called Femmican West in Silicon Valley. I got fired about three weeks into being a summer associate, actually, not even a full-time employee. I was essentially blacklisted. How did you get fired? It's impossible to get fired. 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 have done if I would have been a partner there. One of the senior female partners propositioned me, wanted to hook up with me. She was married. Not that that meant anything to me at the time.

Or to female lawyers, by the way.

Well, not to her. I don't know. I'm not going to say all the rest. You're not going to generalize?

Let me do. I'll handle the generalization here.

To her, it didn't obviously mean anything. For some reason, I turned her down and then told everyone about it, which is like, if I had slept with her, it would have been bulletproof. If I just shut up, no one would have cared. But I did the of all worlds. I was a liability. You can't have someone acting like that in a law firm. Yeah, you can.

Turn down a partner's advance and then tell others about it. The Bar Association could get involved at that point. That is a violation of ethics.

And it's intelligence. What's wrong with you? Why are you so dumb? There's a way to play this game, and you're doing it totally wrong. And I was. Even that wouldn't have blacklisted me from the legal profession. But I wrote two Two days before she propositioned me or before they fired me, I had gotten drunk at a firm event and caused a scene, although it was funny. I wrote an email about it that was pretty funny. I sent it to my friends. What was the scene? We had a charity auction, and I got up and I took the mic from the auctioneer, and I was yelling at this girl because she was bidding against me and the price was high. I'm like, Stop bidding. I can't afford this, and I need this to stay at the firm. It was like a funny... It was like the funny drunken person in a corporate event. I really didn't go too far, but I went right up to that line.

As a summer associate, the line is lower for you. Exactly.

Even the managing partner thought it was hilarious. I wrote an email about that, not about the female partner. Sent that to my friends on a Tuesday, and then on Wednesday, I was fired. They didn't even wait till Friday.Not on Wednesday. Smart. Of course, my friends are assholes. They sent that to all their friends, and then it went out from there. Everyone in the legal profession got that email that summer. There's always legends about it. I was one of the legends that ended up turning it in.

Was your plan at that point to spend your life in big law?

Yeah, it was. It really was. I hate to say it. The God's honest truth is I was the worst... Okay, so I was deciding out of undergrad whether to go to iBanking, Management Consulting or law. I was that type of dude. I had that mindset.

Seeking soul death.

No, I was seeking status without merit, which is what everyone in those professions is doing. That's the thing. 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. I bought it. I bought the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker. I was going after that. But I think there was obviously a part of me, whatever you want to call it.

The drunk at the work event part.

Who clearly did not want that. There was a part of me. Some people, you'll be mass murderers who want to get caught. Of course. Well, I wanted to get kicked. 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, soueless path that I didn't want to go to. So I acted 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, what response did you get?

They almost didn't let me come back for my senior year or my third year at Duke. No.

It got back to Duke.

Oh, it got everyone. If I had wanted to stay in the legal profession, I would have had to be a public defender. There was no... I'm serious. No No one was going to pay.

Not that low. A divorce attorney.

Maybe Jack. I might have been able to be a Jack officer. That would have been it. Went up like David French.

Hilarious. Sorry. I love legal jokes. So Duke was mad.

So at this point, you realized- The only reason she let me come back and finish my third year, I'm not really sure if it could- Speaking she, generally, just the big she. No, the- The lady that Duke makes the decision. The head of the I forget what her exact title was. But the only reason she let me back was because I promised not to walk at graduation. I was going to graduate. And so it was basically, I wasn't there at graduation, which I didn't care about going to anyway, because I knew I wasn't going to be 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, which probably, honestly, would have been the best thing for me. But I was one of those where I like, No, I want to actually have the… I don't want to say I went to Duke Law School. I have the JD, which I do. But then also, I had such… It was like my party years. Everyone else's party years were an undergrad. Mine were in law school.

Had you been in a fraternity in college? No. It's pretty funny. Yeah, I know. Since you invented this genre of fraternity literature.

The New York Times said, 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? They're going to look at everything.

They know about genres anyway.

They're going to get literally everything wrong. Of course they are.

So what did you decide to do with your life at this point?

You're out of options, right? It was not a good situation for me because where I was was I had enough courage to get drunk and ruin a future I didn't want, but not enough courage to recognize that that's what I was doing. So I was in this tough situation. My dad owned some restaurants in Florida. And so I was still looking for the easy path. Like law and iBanking and management consulting, even though you're working 100 something hour a week, they really are the easy path. They are the soulless, easy, coward path. The next coward path for me was the family business. I never really wanted to go into restaurants with the family business, but now I'm like, Well, this is... The two I've trained for I wasn't good at, so I'm not allowed to anymore. So I went that path. Then I got fired from the family business in six months. It took me six months instead of three weeks.

How did you get fired from the family business?

That's a long Sorry. Basically, I was good at this. Now, I was good because it's restaurant business, right? I'm smart and outgoing. If you're smart and outgoing, the restaurant business is designed for people who don't fit anywhere else but are smart and capable. I I was good at it. The problem was I assumed that my dad wanted to run a good business. I didn't realize the business existed for my dad's ego. I got in and realized, Oh, there's all kinds of people here who suck, who are stealing from him. There's all these things we could be doing better. I mean, really basic stuff. Why are we ordering from this company? They're charging twice as much as this company. It turns out that company has given my dad kickbacks. Then these people who are incompetent stealing from him feed my dad's ego in a way that he values way more than what they're stealing. But like a fool, just like I didn't sleep with a partner and told everyone, I went in, recognized these people were clowns, and was like, Oh, well, this is my dad and my name's on the door. So clearly, the fact that I'm right is more than enough.

I told them that they sucked and that I was going to get them fired. They were smart enough and knew my dad well enough. They rallied the troops and got enough evidence against me that 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-And unemployment. So what do you do?

Man, I was not in a good spot. It was a hard time for me. And I was basically like, bartending, the jobs that losers in their 20s get, that was me. I was a loser in my 20s, early 20s. Then at the same time, I was writing emails to my friends from law school about all... I was living in South Florida, which is a soulless, horrible place because I don't do drugs and I'm not old. There was no social niche for me in South Florida. Because if you do coke and you go to clubs, South Florida is great. If you're 70 and play golf in the Bocca Country Club, then it's great. But there's nothing else. I hated my life. But I I get drunk and hook up with girls anyway and get in these horrible situations and write emails about it and send them to my friends. One of my friends, a guy, a great... You actually might even... Do you know Sean Trendy, a real clear politics? Yeah. Okay. Sean went to law school with me. He's a good friend of mine. He's a great dude. He actually called me up and he was getting the emails.

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. I was like, What the What bitch shit is this? What are you talking about, Sean? This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. He's like, Well, dude, look at the evidence, right? What a wise piece of advice. It was Sean that gave it to me. I'm a writer because of Sean trendy, truly. He said. Yes, it is 100% true. 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. I I ended up putting my stuff on the... First, actually, no. I took the five emails that my friend thought 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. There was actually literally, this was 2000, 2001, 2002. There was a physical book of all the agents' addresses and all their query stuff. Because you're old enough to remember this.

Yeah, very well.

I probably sent a thousand query letters, maybe between 500 and a thousand. I got zero zero positive, literally zero positive response, like 90% nothing. Then probably got 50 form letter rejections. I even got, I still have a couple of them, a couple of personalized rejections where the editor was like, This is the worst thing I've ever read, you should never write even an email again. You have no place in publishing. But at the same time, I was sending my emails. All the emails I'd forwarded to my friends, they would forward those. Not not just the ones that got me fired, but the funny ones after. I was getting my emails forwarded back to me. Remember early in internet, email chains? Yeah. Okay. I was getting my own emails forwarded back to me from people in other social circles who didn't know I had written them, be like, Dude, you should read this. This is so funny. I'm like, All right, so clearly I'm good at this. Sean was right. These are funny to people who weren't friends. I'm like, All right, it is arrogant to think this, but all these people in publishing are wrong.

Now I know publishing. I'm like, Of course, they're all wrong. They're all idiots. It's 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, but I was like, All right, well, they're not going to publish me. But then the internet was a thing at the time. This was 2002. I had to learn to program HTML. I put up a site on geoCities. If you remember geoCities? I got featured on College Humor and a few other, those humor blogs that were really early, and it blew up. M TV came and did a documentary about people who were dating on... Because back when dating on the internet was weird and creepy and all. They did a documentary about me, and that blew up. Then all the publishing companies came back, and they were like, We want to write books, and then that became, I hope they serve beer in hell. It's happening daily. We're being conned by the institutions we used to trust. The mainstream media is distracting us with meaningless headlines instead of focusing on the harsh realities facing American families.

Time is short before something big happens, and that's why so many folks are preparing. They're becoming self-reliant by investing in emergency food storage from My Patriot Supply. Go to My Patriot patriotsupply. Com and secure four-week emergency food kits for each member of your family. Each kit contains tasty breakfast, lunches, and dinners, averaging over 2,000 calories per day. Save $50 on each four-week food kit you purchase, plus get free shipping on ready Our four-week emergency food kits. You're not ready if it's not Ready Our Foods. At My Patriot Supply, you can also get solar power generators, water filtration units, heirloom seeds, and survival gear. Order by 3:00 PM, and your unmarked box ship the same day. Shop mypatriotsupply. Com today. Mypatriotsupply. Com.

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

I wrote four Frattire books. One, I gave away for free, so it didn't count, but three were published. All three were New York Times best sellers. I think I've sold about four and a half-ish million of those books.

That's incredible.

Especially because My audience were essentially people who don't read. I can't tell you how many dudes in my life, it's been tens of thousands, have told me, I've never finished a book, read a book, or bought a book other than yours.

I believe that.

Tens of thousands.

Why did you stop? And when did you stop?

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. And then by the time I started writing at 27. By the time I got to about 33, 34, I was pretty tired of it. Drinking and partying and going out five nights a week is super fun when you're at a certain stage in life. I was way past that stage of life. It was becoming tedious and tiresome. The cost of that lifestyle was really, not just the physical cost, but the emotional cost was catching up to me. Honestly, man, everyone who goes… 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 I was feeling stuck, man. You can't move on at life if you have to be this person that is doing a thing at a certain phase. That's, oh, dude, it was so depressing because all my fans would come to me. I do public events all the time, speeches, whatever. They were all really upset if I wasn't the Tucker Max they envisioned in their head.

At the time, I would get really mad at them. Fuck you, I'm a whole person. But that was my own immaturity. They liked me because of my stories and because of a certain attitude I had 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.

Mick Jagger has to sing Satisfaction at every show.

Right.

Yeah.

And I wasn't going to sing Satisfaction the rest of my life. Eventually, as I matured a little, I'm like, Look, what am I doing getting mad at them? Even the dumb immature ones, the smart mature ones got it. They read the books out, they were funny, didn't expect me to be. But that was 20%, right? Most people, they would come up and they have this multi-year relationship with me that has nothing to do with me. It's totally unilateral, and it's all about a projection in their mind of who I am based only on the books. It got really tiring after a while. 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. I wrote the last in the series was Ascles Finish First, and I put it like a retirement at the end, where I'm like, I'm not going to write this stuff, talk about it anymore. I've done with this part of my life. Then that did set me free, although most people who know me know me from that stuff. Even that, bro, for years afterwards, I would be at Whole Foods, and a kid, a younger kid or something would come up to me and be like, Oh, it's your Tucker Max.

Why aren't you drunk, screaming curses at people, laying under a table? I'm like, It's 11 AM on a Thursday. What is wrong with you, dude? Even now, to this day, a lot of people, their impression of me, even after they meet me, is still-How did you find a wife?based.

On that. I mean, so you've laid bare your personal life, and you sold four and a half million copies of books about hooking up with various women.

I told the truth about things most people don't ever tell the truth about. For sure. Yes.

What did that teach you about what you wanted in a wife?

Well, it definitely showed me very much what I don't want. Because a lot of the... 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, the same stage as me, came to me. There were a lot. I realized, man, there's so much. The big thing, man, was I realized I needed a woman who was very smart, who was very sweet and empathic. But most importantly, I need a woman who really had her own thing in life, who really thought for herself, who really was her own person. Because three or four years before I started, I retired, I would have been really happy with the hottest girl there was who was pretty sweet and basically a trophy wife. I would have been totally cool with that. Then by the time I got to be about 32, 33, 34, I realized, Oh, thank God I didn't get married. I would have been so miserable with that. I would have hated that. I would have been divorced within five, six years. I realized I needed a partner, and then I started to understand what a partner actually would look like for me at that point.

That's the crazy thing, man. I think I had to go through, whatever, hundreds or thousands of women to realize how lonely I was and how lonely that life is after a while. The metaphor I always use is, imagine that like... Because dudes don't get this, man. They don't understand. Women do. Most women understand what I mean when I talk about this. Because most guys have to go their whole life It doesn't matter how good-looking you are, how smart or how rich you are. You have to work for women. You have to have game. You have to talk to them. You have to be good in some way, at least connecting with a woman. But once you get famous, all that's out the window. You don't have to really do anything but other than be famous. There's a million examples of this, of dudes who have no business being with any women who are famous, who get all kinds of women. You can't understand what that's like as a dude because you've spent your whole life… Imagine living on a desert island and you're scraping out in existence and you have food, but never enough. Then all of a sudden, you get picked up off of that desert island and you get moved into a Chinese buffet.

You live at the Chinese buffet and you're like, You're going to gorge your sofa a while or the best Vegas buffet you can ever-Yeah, Golden Corral, forever. You're going to gorge your sofa a while. In fact, you're going to gorge yourself until you throw up a few times, and then you're going to keep gorgeing yourself. That was what my life was like. Because women are always a scarcity for you as a dude. It doesn't matter how rich you are or how good-looking you are, how smart you are. There's still a scarcity until you become famous, and 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. There's always dudes around. Women can understand that. I didn't understand that at all. Then I had to revel in that abundance for a while and wallow in it until it became, like all abundance, becomes sickening and you have to- Like all abundance, that's right. Right. You've got a really, okay, I don't want everything. Here's the things. Here's what's healthy, here's what I want. Let me figure out what that is. In a lot of ways, the best...

It's funny. People will say, your intro is really good. It seems like a 180-degrees turnaround. From where I sit, having lived it, I couldn't have gotten to be a dedicated father and husband at home et cetera, if I hadn't gone through that phase of unbridled 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, if my wife was cool with two or three, I might be all right with that, too. But no, no. It was lots and lots of different women was not an effective way to fill the hole of womanness.

Yes, that's right.

For a while, I thought it worked, but it doesn't work long time. No, it doesn't work.

Abundance doesn't work.

But, Tucker, you could not have convinced me of that with any words when I was 29. I would have...

It's an age thing. No, it's totally right. I've arrived at the same conclusion. 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 and it's all I do now.

But what motivated your desire to make that your life? What is homesteading and why do you do it?

I didn't come up with this goal ahead of time and then do it. I discovered this path as I walked it. After I retired from writing, the stories of drinking, hooking I retired from fratire. 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. I started a company called Scribe that we… David Goggins, I'm sure we did his books, and Tiffany Hadish, and some other people like that. We did about… From the time I started until when I left, which was 2022, like 2,000 books. We were the premier independent ghostwriting publishing firm. We built a great company, 500 employees. Me and my co founder, Zack, built a great company, and it was rewarding. I went through the entrepreneurial phase of life. Before, I thought I was on control, but I was an artist. Being an artist and running a business with employees are totally different things.Oh.

I found out.Totally.

Different things.Yes.I did not understand that.I.

Only do one of those things, not the other.Yeah..

There was a lot rewarding with it. Started the business. I met my wife first, then started the business. As the business grew and developed, I saw a very clear path to a lot of money, big valuations, expansion, all this stuff. But at the same time, my relationship with my wife and my kids, and as my kids got older, even though my kids are still pretty young, I was like, Mmm. 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. I saw how miserable they were in a lot of ways and how much time they spent on their business, how little they spent with their families. Then I would meet their kids and be like, Something's off. Not all of them. Some of them had great balance and some didn't. I just realized, man, that as much as I did, I like business and I like entrepreneurship, I didn't love it. I definitely didn't love it more than my wife and my kids. I I realized, I don't know when I came to this realization, but I came to the realization that the only thing that matters in my life is the relationships with the people I love and the things I do that matter to them.

Yeah, I mean, Having a company to make money, that's important, but above a certain level, what am I doing? I'm just stealing from my children. I'm stealing my father from their children. I'm stealing my children's father from them, which is me. I decided I wasn't going to do that. That 200 million or a billion dollars is not worth that. 20 million isn't even worth it.

It's not worth it. But most people have this realization, decided, Okay, we're going to spend a year in sail to New Zealand. But you decided to buy a homestead in Texas and grow your own food, raise your own food. Why?

Well, there were a couple of reasons. You were around 2020, 2021. So I don't have to describe all that.

Well, how did it affect you? I mean, you weren't working in politics, right? No, no, no.

I wrote a piece on this on my blog about how I thought I was awake to how the world worked because I'd work in the entertainment business. You have, too. You understand media entertainment. If you work in that business, you see behind the curtain and how messed up everything is. I saw how evil Hollywood was long before the #MeToo stuff. I knew everyone in Hollywood knew Weinstein was a rapist. I thought I But then 2020 happened and the lockdowns happened and all this, and I was like, Oh, it's way worse than I ever thought. I saw a little bit behind the current, but I didn't really- That was a public health emergency. Of course it was. Did you think that for a moment, did you think any of this was just... You grew up in this country.

Tell us what you thought.

When I was watching the videos of people dying in the street in China, like early early March of 2020. There was a window of about, for being honest, about six weeks. I was probably fooled. Three to six weeks. Yeah, me too.

It's scary.

This might be legit. This might be an actual epidemic, a pandemic. This might be whatever. You can actually look on my Twitter timeline. When South Side was canceled in 2020, I was for that. I was like, Oh, yeah, that was March 15th of 2020. I was totally for that. But then by mid-April, I'm like, Hold on. Nothing about this seems right. And by May, I'm like, Oh, well, this is a fraud. This is clearly a fraud. And then the riot started and it was like... I mean, the iconic photo of the CNN with the Kyron, mostly peaceful protest, there's fire in the background. I was like, Come on. I'm not...

But if you're rioting for racial justice, you're not going to spread a deadly virus, right?

Obviously, of course. My My favorite were the people who was like, Well, racial injustice is deadlier than... Or racial injustice is deadlier than COVID. I'm like, Stop.

Your racism is scarier than a Chinese virus. Just stop, right.

That's when I was like, Okay, so this is utter, total bullshit. 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? It was, obviously, this was fraudulent.

This was a total fraud.

But why?

Well, see, I went to all the big schools. Woke wasn't a shock to me. I saw that coming for years. In fact, I had a company that was 70% women and all creative. You think we would have been infected early? No, I saw it coming. I kept it out of scribe. For as long as I was there, I was able to keep it out. It's actually, if you want 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.

Because they're incompetent.

Not necessarily. Some of them are smart and capable. It's that the woke mind virus is about placing blame for your life on other people. If everything is first about responsibility and accountability, those people will not come to your organization. I was able to shelter my world from that. No, it works. It works beautifully. I was able to shelter my world from them pretty well. Once I saw all this, 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 truly catastrophically corrupt government was until January sixth of 2021. My wife I decided to buy land the summer of 2020, and we bought our house in Tennessee that I showed you that we talked about. Because at the time, I didn't really understand. I didn't think America was at the state it was yet. The way I looked at preparation and emergency stuff was a bug-out place. We bought a beautiful house in the mountains, isolated, because that's where my level of consciousness and understanding was. Then January 21st happened, and in real time- January sixth. Sorry, January sixth.

January sixth of 2021. In real time, you just watched the feeds and I saw... Because it wasn't hidden. The Capitol police were letting people in. Most of these people were just drunk and buffoons. It was obvious that this was nonsense, that this was in no way, shape, or form, anything approaching an insurrection. 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 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.

When you watched them tell you what you were seeing wasn't real.

It was something totally else. Media is always wrong, but just because they're wrong doesn't mean the opposite's true. You have to look in the direction that they're wrong. 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 fascist, communist, whatever, some form of totalitarians, a police state. All the evidence was there. It's pretty common. 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 it fell during the Whisky Rebellion. You can make an argument several times in the 18th century, definitely during the Civil War, lots of times in the 20th century.

Yeah, like when they murdered the President? Yeah.

Lots of times. Jfk. I don't know when the American Republic fell, but it became very clear, undeniably clear to me on January sixth, 2021, that we were not just an empire, but we were the late stages of empire. I'd essentially missed understanding the American Empire was an empire. I was like, Oh, man. Then once I got that, then I'm like, Oh, now everything makes sense. This is empire collapse. I understand empire pretty well. I'm very, like all dudes, very interested in the Roman history and Mongolian history. 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 a Republic. But under Genghis Khan, the Mongolian Empire was what we would consider a free place in a lot of ways for these Mongolians. The transition from that to his sons and grandsons.

Less Very different.

It was empire collapse. I'm like, This is exactly what's going on. Then once I got that, that was when my wife and I got serious about, 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, broken supply chains, riots, whatever. That's the best case scenario. It was just more of what we saw in 2020. I dove deep into the 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.

How long did it take for you to realize that your bug-out place in the North Carolina Mountains?

January first, 2021.

Is that right? So that's not adequate. Explain why that's not adequate.

Because when empires When air collapses, the thing that matters most is community. Who are you around? What skills do they have? What skills do you have? How well can your group band together and endure the tumultuous chaos until some new steady-state arises. Having a cabin in the woods is the opposite of community. The old-school American thought of prepping is really based on nuclear war and hiding a bunker. It's just nonsense. It's not really thought out. But if you go study End of Empire and you study people who've lived through intense chaos, they all say the same thing. When the Roman Empire, not the Republic, when the Empire fell, there were lots of places that did great because some warlord or the local Roman general would just say, Okay, we're going to make this town my empire, and the legions are going to marry local girls, and this is our area. And those became... I mean, you can name them.

And no visagoths allowed. No chaos.

Lots of parts of Gaul thrive for thousands of years, hundreds, if not thousands of years after, because they had local rule, all the things that were. Now, the Roman Empire fell, but for a lot of people in the aftermath of that did really well if they had great community. Same with Mongolia, same with a lot of ways, the British Empire. The British Empire was a little different. It was a more modern empire. But the point is, my cabin in the woods had no community. My wife and I were like, Where can we go to find community? How do we build the community? It starts by not a cabin in the woods, but by growing, raising your own food, taking responsibility for water, power, and food, but in the context of where a lot of other people are doing this thing. We knew we wanted to stay in Texas for a few reasons, and we ended up picking Dripping Springs. There's a lot of towns in Texas that are doing things like this. 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.

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.

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

Well, generally speaking, a ranch is where you just raise livestock. But what we bought was... Because I didn't know, right? I didn't really understand land. I bought a place that this older guy, this boomer, had carved out of nothing, and it was beautiful, beautiful oak and rolling pasture, but it was dead. I mean, literally dead. The soil was dead. Everything was dead because the way he dealt with the land was very 20th century mentality. It was a Pesticides kill the bugs, herbicides kill the weeds, fertilizer raises the grass. That doesn't really work well. It can work for a while in certain circumstances. But if you want to actually have a living thriving ecosystem, I 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... I had to fire all the people he had that were working there, the landscapers or whatever. Everything was irrigated. He had St. Augustine grass, which requires like 130 inches of rain a year in Texas.

You're not getting 130 inches of rain in.

He was irrigating. But nonetheless, it's like, what are we doing? This doesn't make sense with our land and where we are. The last two years, I've spent essentially turning it into living soil and regenerating the land and doing management practices that make sense for Dripping Spring, Texas, for 30 inches of rain a year. Now, 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, We have garden. We're starting to put in all kinds of stuff. 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 we have a system where we can endure a lot of chaos and be totally fine. We're surrounded by people in our community who are, for the most part, in the same position or very similar. They have similar values, similar approach to the world. That's why we started at Waldorf School, literally three minutes from our- So for viewers who're not familiar with Waldorf, what is that? There's lots of different educational philosophies.

Acton, Montessori, public school, Waldorf is a philosophy that started in Germany like 150 years ago. I think it is by far, of the educational philosophies, it's by far the best. It is the one that feeds the emotional side. It's like a renaissance style, where it tries to help-The whole child. Help create the whole child. Of the educational styles, I think it's the best. That being said, I'm still not sure if organized schooling is right for kids or not, because right now we have one kid I'm homeschooling because he doesn't have enough kids in his class for the Waldorf. 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 or worse.

So all of your children are out of the public schools?

Oh, never went into public schools. My man, I don't hate my kids. I'm never going to send them to public schools.

That raises a philosophical... I want to put this to the President of the United States with a message I think is relevant to you, which is that those are not your kids, actually. Here he is.

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.

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

It's like when people say, I'm coming to take your guns. It's like, well, stack up. Stack up and come get them. Same with kids. No, those are my kids. Those children are mine and my wife's. Now, I 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 their 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.

That is- And you disagree with that.

Disagreement is not strong enough. It's not. It's not a strong enough term. There's just no chance that's going to exist in my worlds. Just not.

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 state just come in.

Do whatever they want to their kids.

Sexualize their kids, basically like kiddie porn shit with their kids, and they allow it. Why?

Man, It's a good question. I don't know. Clearly, I would never in a million years allow anything like that. I think most people can only give their kids what they got. Most people were raised by people who went to public schools, and they went to public schools, and they were raised... Public schools are designed to create obedient employees. That's the most charitable interpretation.

It maintains the surf class.

That's the point of it. It does. I'm not saying this. This isn't like a conspiracy theory or a metaphor. There's a guy, John Taylor-Gotto, who wrote a couple of great books about this. The literal stated goal. Horace Mann, all those people who invented the American public educational system, their stated goal is to create subservient employees who know how to be good citizens. I didn't have children for that reason to serve some other man or woman or some faceless bureaucratic entity. No. 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 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? 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 knew this… I had never had any plan to send my kids to public school.

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. They didn't mix a lot of love. Seriously. People laugh. But I'm telling you, man, so many people- That was the upside of my bad childhood. No, it was.

My parents didn't pretend they cared.

Because 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. I never mixed love and abuse. And also, they didn't really show up much for me. I realized at a young age that the adults weren't coming. 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. 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. Yeah, I mean, it's true.

I just love your attitude about your childhood. That's a wonderful attitude to have.

Well, I got there after a lot of emotional work, a lot of therapy, a lot of psychedelic medicine, a lot of work. I wasn't always like that. I was angry for a while.

It's pointless to be mad about the past.

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

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. 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. We both have grown so much together over the last 10 years in parallel ways. But I've seen people who split in the last three, four years because their values just went different. The split was already there, but this forced it.

You've organized your life around surviving what you think is coming and protecting your family.

What's here now? What do you think- And then what might come?

What do you think might come?

What does that look like? I have no idea. 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. If an asteroid hits Florida, nothing I'm doing is probably going to make any difference. It's 95% of people are going to die. It's going to be horrible. It's going to be Armageddon. 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. 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 US, without going too deep in this rabbit hole, the US 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.

It accelerates its decline.

Right. Exactly. There was a point where the US debt was totally saved, definitely during the Clinton administration, and maybe even as recently as the Obama administration. 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. And so that plus the massive stimulus bills, what they were was graphed. But that plus the response to COVID, they were past the point in overtime. What happens when government defaults? War, and then a lot of other consequences from that. 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. Disastres 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. It's just going to be painful to get there.

Here's one potential mid to short term outcome, which is that we continue pushing for war with Iran, which apparently doesn't yet have nuclear weapons. We do, Israel does. The whole coalition, a raid against Iran has them, they don't. So how do they respond? Well, maybe they just unplug United States. Maybe a cyber attack or EMP attack takes out our digital life.

Totally possible.

I can't even know what to think about what that would look like, but where would that leave you on your home Homestead. Are you living a life that could withstand that?

I'm not a huge believer in. Now you have to be off-grid and you got to be living like the Amish. First off, off-grid doesn't exist. Even the Amish aren't off-grid. If you think about it, they don't mind their own ore and they don't smelt it. So not disparaging the Amish. Believe me, I've been like, Man, these dudes had some stuff figured out. I didn't realize before.

You're pro-amish for the record.

Maybe Probably. Pro certain things about Amish. But I don't think off-grid exists, and I'm not a believer in, Oh, if you're not doing everything hand, it doesn't work. 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... There's a lot of political and social upheaval now. It's already happening, and I think it's going to get worse. I want to make sure that I'm in the best place possible to survive that. I'm not trying to go be the Unibomber and live only off the land and only have things that ancient men had. If you want to do that, cool. I I like the electricity.

But you're not making your own bombs like he did.

Dude, I like electricity. I like air conditioning. I live in Texas. I really like air conditioning. It's pretty crucial for us. I like modern conveniences. I want to continue using those as much as possible, and that makes sense. But I also 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 Goldman Sachs or go to law school unless you are deep in the consumerist mindset. I I think one of the major psychological shifts I've made is I have gotten out of the consumerist mindset to more of a shepherd mindset. 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 to consume resources and status. Basically, most of our parents were I want this house in the suburbs. I'm going to have these vacations. I'm going to go to these places. I'm going to have this rank in my society. It's an externally created identity. Because what do you even know what to consume? It's what your screen, what your media tells you is important and what you should be consuming. Where's your status come from? What matters? What car is cool or not? What clothes are cool or not? That's a consumerist mindset. Of course, I'm American, so I was deeply enmeshed and immersed in that growing up. But one of the great travesies, I think, of the last 30 years is that the conservation movement and the environmental movement weren't one and the same. They were enemies for a long time. 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. I am a big believer, like your studio. 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.

Everyone says that, but not many people actually do that. They live a life that is divorced from the actual soil around them and the trees around them and the animals around them. The last For 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. I had no idea what it even meant to live in harmony with nature. Having a homestead, what's so awesome about having a homestead is that it has forced me to live in reality. You can have your phone. And consumer's mindset, you can live in abstraction. Everything is abstract. But when you live, whether having a homestead or a ranch or a farm or hunting, you have to actually pay attention to reality or nothing works. Nothing. And it has grounded me in a way that I thought I was grounded, but I wasn't. And that's a huge reason why I wanted to get on land. My wife and I wanted to get on land is because we craved that in our lives. As we did emotional work and dealt with our issues, we felt the divorce from the world and wanted to get more integrated into the natural world, but then also wanted to raise our kids that way so that they never had to be divorced from that and had to find their way back to it.

The whole point of public school is to separate the child from the family and orient them in bureaucratic Corporatist consumerist society. I'm torn because I like electricity and I like cool stuff. 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. 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, literally, their My body, their rules. My kid at any point can basically stop anything going on saying, My body, my rules. I don't want to go. I don't want to do that. If it's not unsafe, then I'm like, Okay, all right, we got to figure it out. Basic things like that, man, I wasn't thinking about until 2, 3, 4, 5 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, the way humans relate to each other.

Give me an example. When you say poisonous, what do you mean?

Food. You want to talk about food? Yeah. All right. So virtually everything you find in a grocery store is at best unhealthy, at worst, literal poison. My favorite example, Most people in America now for cooking use seed oils, canola oil. Canola oil was literally invented as a lubricant for machines. I forget the exact history of it, but it is a 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 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, unless you're picking a head of lettuce or something like that, if it's in a package, something like, I forget, 70 plus % of stuff in packages in Whole Foods has oil in it. It's poison. It's absolute poison.

Do you feel the difference, having gotten off it?

I mean, I'm 48 years old. Just two days ago, some friends of mine were looking at one of my book covers, and the dude was like, What are you, a vampire? You look like you haven't aged. I'm like, No, I've aged. But unlike most people in our society, I have been healthy for the last 20 years. Most people, you look at... I'm 48. Most 48-year-old men are a minimum of 30 pounds overweight, can barely do push-ups or pull-ups, are close to death. Metabolically, are prediabetes, are horribly unhealthy. I don't even think I'm in that great of shape. I just don't eat the poisonous stuff. I'm like, Okay, I'm going to try and only eat meat from my homestead. I'm Metabolically, if you look at all the markers, my genetic age is in the 20s. I don't do anything that special, man. I'm not working out six hours a day or any nonsense like that. I just eat healthy. Healthy means 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 is grass and water or bugs if it's chickens. That's it.

You mentioned God offhandedly. Has your view of the eternal changed? Radically.

Really? Radically. I think at a certain point in your life, if you are educated and you believe in God, 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 I don't believe you can reason your way to God. No. I know St. Augustine, whatever, I'm with you. And Thomas More. Okay, fine. I just don't think you get to God from reason. And so I was an atheist my whole life because God never made sense, if you think, logically- Is that how you grew up? I grew up actually in the Episcopal Church. 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.

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. Then it was about four years ago. It's funny. I had never done, I drink a lot. Never done any drugs in my life, ever, until I found... Part of my therapeutic protocols, I did psychedelic medicine, like MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, but with a guide and not recreationally. I don't know how you do that stuff. People take LSD and go to concerts. I took LSD and cried and found God. The experience for me was not talking to God. I felt the oneness of all things, and I felt the connection to all things, and I felt I understood. I knew Jesus's and Buddha's teachings academically, but then I was like, it was one very specific experience. It was LSD. I remember thinking, Oh, fuck. The Kingdom of Heaven is within. Now I know what Jesus was talking about. If you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him. I'm like, Oh, now I know what Buddha was talking about. I have a really good friend who's Norman.

He's the type of Norman that 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 of...

I don't know what you're into, but I want to know more.

He's one of those guys. I called him two days after my thing, and I'm like, Ben, when you say you have a relationship with God. You mean that literally. It's an experience for you. He goes, Bro, I've been trying to tell you this for a decade. 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. I did not understand religion. I did not understand spirituality or belief in God until I had the experience. For me, I had to get there on psychedelics. I don't really feel like I do now. The It's important to open me up, but now I think I have enough of a connection to source, to God, whatever you want to call it. I'm very much a God guy, but not in the way most God guys are. Not a religious way. 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. 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, I'll give you the eightfold path and all that to help you, but then you shed it when it's time.

Is your wife in the same place you are?

I think pretty much, yeah.

How has it changed your life?

That's like a- Because that's a different way of seeing the world. In every single way. I got past consumerism because of this. Because once you, not realize intellectually, once you feel the one... And some people can get there like a church, and some people get there with yoga. I'm not saying my way is better or worse. It's just the way. Once I felt the oneness of all things, all of the frivolities and the nonsense and the lies of the modern narrative fell away. Then for me, it was like, Oh, 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. Yeah, I'm a human and it's a chicken. But we're all parts of the same system. We're all parts of God. If you want to call the system God, I'm on board. 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. No, that's just not true.

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. They're very against religious faith.

Everything I just said is absolutely, completely, catastrophically counter to all things government 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 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. You need me. That's right. And the message from Jesus and from God, let's just stick with Christianity. Is you don't need them.

I knew I'd never met you before today. I have a ton of daughters, and I did when you were writing your books and whatever. I wasn't living that life, but I could tell you were a deep person. Even reading, I hope they serve beer in hell. Not to brag, I turned out to be right. Tucker Max, thank you for spending all this time. Yeah. That was amazing.

Thank you for having me, man.

I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson podcast. If you liked it, be sure to hit subscribe and leave a review. Remember, we only release some of our interviews as podcast. The only place you can get all of it, including past episodes, is tuckercarlson. Com, and we hope you will.